Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Mar 16, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 16, 2018 - Aug 17, 2018
Date Accepted: Oct 30, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Differences in Emotional and Pain-Related Language in Tweets About Dentists and Medical Doctors: Text Analysis of Twitter Content
Background:
Social media provides people with easy ways to communicate their attitudes and feelings to a wide audience. Many people, unfortunately, have negative associations and feelings about dental treatment due to former painful experiences. Previous research indicates that there might be a pervasive and negative occupational stereotype related to dentists and that this stereotype is expressed in many different venues, including movies and literature.
Objective:
This study investigates the language used in relation to dentists and medical doctors on the social media platform Twitter. The purpose is to compare the professions in terms of the use of emotional and pain-related words, which might underlie and reflect the pervasive negative stereotype identified in relation to dentists. We hypothesized that (A) tweets about dentists will have more negative emotion-related words than those about medical doctors and (B) pain-related words occur more frequently in tweets about dentists than in those about medical doctors.
Methods:
Twitter content (“tweets”) about dentists and medical doctors was collected using the Twitter application program interface 140Dev over a 4-week period in 2015, scanning the search terms “dentist” and “doctor”. Word content of the selected tweets was analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. The research hypotheses were investigated using nonparametric Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests.
Results:
Over 2.3 million tweets were collected in total, of which about one-third contained the word “dentist” and about two-thirds contained the word “doctor.” Hypothesis A was supported since a higher proportion of negative words was used in tweets about dentists than in those about medical doctors (z=−10.47; P<.001). Similarly, tests showed a difference in the proportions of anger words (z=−12.54; P<.001), anxiety words (z=−6.96; P<.001), and sadness words (z=−9.58; P<.001), with higher proportions of these words in tweets about dentists than in those about doctors. Also, Hypothesis B was supported since a higher proportion of pain-related words was used in tweets about dentists than in those about doctors (z=−8.02; P<.001).
Conclusions:
The results from this study suggest that stereotypes regarding dentists and dental treatment are spread through social media such as Twitter and that social media also might represent an avenue for improving messaging and disseminating more positive attitudes toward dentists and dental treatment.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.