Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Diabetes
Date Submitted: Jun 15, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 16, 2018 - Aug 11, 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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Content Analysis of Metaphors About Hypertension and Diabetes on Twitter: Exploratory Mixed-Methods Study
Background:
Widespread metaphors contribute to the public’s understanding of health. Prior work has characterized the metaphors used to describe cancer and AIDS. Less is known about the metaphors characterizing cardiovascular disease.
Objective:
The objective of our study was to characterize the metaphors that Twitter users employ in discussing hypertension and diabetes.
Methods:
We filtered approximately 10 billion tweets for keywords related to diabetes and hypertension. We coded a random subset of 5000 tweets for the presence of metaphor and the type of metaphor employed.
Results:
Among the 5000 tweets, we identified 797 (15.9%) about hypertension or diabetes that employed metaphors. When discussing the development of heart disease, Twitter users described the disease as a journey (n=202), as transmittable (n=116), as an object (n=49), or as being person-like (n=15). In discussing the experience of these diseases, some Twitter users employed war metaphors (n=101). Other users described the challenge to control their disease (n=34), the disease as an agent (n=58), or their bodies as machines (n=205).
Conclusions:
Metaphors are used frequently by Twitter users in their discussion of hypertension and diabetes. These metaphors can help to guide communication between patients and providers to improve public health.
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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.