Assessment of attitudes toward critical actors during public health crises

This study introduces a new analytical framework to assess attitudes towards key stakeholders influencing public behaviour during public health crises, such as governments, crisis management experts, doctors, healthcare workers, and mass media. Due to its accessibility and speed, there is increasing interest in using social media for public surveillance during a crisis. However, analyzing the vast amount data obtained from social media and the lack of practical application for findings obtained so far from current analytical methods have been problematic. This research utilizes Twitter data to analyze public sentiments during two significant crises: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident and the covid-19 pandemic. Findings from our analytical framework showed persistent negative attitudes toward the government and media despite high trust in experts post crisis. The study also revealed that public attitudes toward stakeholders were likely to emerge even years after a crisis and that appropriate responses and initiative scan potentially improve public attitudes. In addition, methodological implications confirm that affective and response analysis, on their own, lack the specificity and reliability to make use of the information in actual responses, but when combined, they output practical information as findings. This study highlights the importance of flexible identification of key stakeholders and real-time monitoring of public attitudes to enhance risk communication during public health crises. The findings contribute to the understanding of using social media data for assessing public attitudes to help shape and inform effective crisis response strategies.