Debates over the role of Traditional Chinese Medicine on COVID-19: A computational comparison between professionals and laypersons in Chinese online knowledge community

IF 4.9 2区医学 Q1 PUBLIC, ENVIRONMENTAL & OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH Social Science & Medicine Pub Date : 2024-09-24 DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117366

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Abstract

Leveraging a large collection of textual data (N = 21,539) from a Chinese online community, we employed structural topic modeling to investigate the thematic disparities between professionals and laypersons, regarding the effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) on COVID-19. Findings reveal that laypersons are the dominant communicators in terms of discussion volume, who often focus on relevant news events, societal or political aspects of TCM. In contrast, professionals keep concentrating on issues related to medical expertise, and do not shift attentions as frequent as laypersons. Despite the dominant influence of professionals on laypersons’ agenda, two-way agenda interactions identified confirm that lay public is empowered to negotiate with elite professionals under certain topics. Our results provide novel insights into the dynamic nature of attentions, behaviors, and relations among prominent communication actors, and encourage future research to examine the individual-level and societal-level impacts of these constructs in the emerging online media landscape.

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COVID-19上关于中医药作用的争论：中文在线知识社区中专业人士和非专业人士的计算比较

利用来自中文在线社区的大量文本数据（N = 21,539），我们采用结构主题建模的方法，研究了专业人士和非专业人士在 COVID-19 上关于中医（TCM）疗效的主题差异。研究结果显示，就讨论量而言，非专业人士是主要的传播者，他们通常关注中医药的相关新闻事件、社会或政治方面。与此相反，专业人士一直专注于与医学专业相关的问题，不像非专业人士那样频繁地转移注意力。尽管专业人士在非专业人士的议程中占主导地位，但双向议程互动证实了非专业人士在某些议题上有能力与精英专业人士进行谈判。我们的研究结果提供了有关关注、行为和重要传播参与者之间关系动态性质的新见解，并鼓励未来的研究在新兴的网络媒体环境中考察这些建构在个人层面和社会层面的影响。

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来源期刊

Social Science & Medicine PUBLIC, ENVIRONMENTAL & OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH-

CiteScore

9.10

自引率

5.60%

发文量

762

审稿时长

38 days

期刊介绍： Social Science & Medicine provides an international and interdisciplinary forum for the dissemination of social science research on health. We publish original research articles (both empirical and theoretical), reviews, position papers and commentaries on health issues, to inform current research, policy and practice in all areas of common interest to social scientists, health practitioners, and policy makers. The journal publishes material relevant to any aspect of health from a wide range of social science disciplines (anthropology, economics, epidemiology, geography, policy, psychology, and sociology), and material relevant to the social sciences from any of the professions concerned with physical and mental health, health care, clinical practice, and health policy and organization. We encourage material which is of general interest to an international readership.