Using Tweets to Assess Mental Well-being of Essential Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Johnna Blair, Chi Yang Hsu, Ling Qiu, Shih Hong Huang, Ting Hao Kenneth Huang, Saeed Abdullah

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to large-scale lifestyle changes and increased social isolation and stress on a societal level. This has had a unique impact on US "essential workers"(EWs) - who continue working outside their homes to provide critical services, such as hospital and infrastructure employees. We examine the use of Twitter by EWs as a step toward understanding the pandemic's impact on their mental well-being, as compared to the population as a whole. We found that EWs authored a higher ratio of mental health related tweets during the pandemic than the average user, but authored fewer tweets with Covid related keywords than average users. Despite this, sentiment analysis showed that, on average, EWs' tweets yield a more positive sentiment score than average Twitter users, both before and during the pandemic. Based on these initial insights, we highlight our future aims to investigate individual differences in this impact to EWs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA 2021
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450380959
DOIs
StatePublished - May 8 2021
Event2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Making Waves, Combining Strengths, CHI EA 2021 - Virtual, Online, Japan
Duration: May 8 2021May 13 2021

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Making Waves, Combining Strengths, CHI EA 2021
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityVirtual, Online
Period5/8/215/13/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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