JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

School-based alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use (ATOD) surveys are a common epidemiological means of understanding youth risk behaviors. They can be used to monitor national trends and provide data, in aggregate, to schools, communities, and states for the purposes of funding allocation, prevention programming, and other supportive infrastructure. However, such surveys are targeted by criticism, and even legal action, with surprising regularity. The ubiquity of social media has added the risk of potential ‘online firestorms’ – or digital outrage events – to the hazards to be considered when administering such a survey. To date, little research has investigated the influence of online firestorms on public health survey administration, and no research has analyzed the content of such an occurrence. Analyzing this content will facilitate insights as to how practitioners can minimize the risk of generating outrage when conducting public health surveys.

Objective:

This study aimed to identify common themes within social media comments comprising an online firestorm that erupted in response to a school-based ATOD survey in order to inform risk-reduction strategies.

Methods:

Data were collected by archiving (via screen capture) all public comments made in response to a news study about a school-based ATOD survey that was featured on a common social networking platform. Using elements of grounded theory and the general inductive approach, two researchers followed an 8-step protocol to clean, categorize, and consolidate data, generating codes for all 207 responses.

Results:

In total, 133 comments were coded as oppositional to the survey, and 74 were coded as supportive. Among the former, comments tended to reflect government-related concerns, conspiratorial or paranoid thinking, issues of parental autonomy/privacy, fear of child protective services or police, issues with survey mechanisms, and reasoned disagreement. Among the latter, responses perceived the ability to prevent abuse/neglect, support wholistic health, surmised that opponents were hiding something, expressed reasoned support, or made factual statements about the survey. Consistent with research on moral outrage and digital firestorms, few comments (<10%) contained factual information about the survey, and nearly half – both supportive and oppositional – presupposed misinformation.

Conclusions:

The components of even a small online firestorm targeting a school-based ATOD survey are nuanced and complex. It is likely impossible to be fully insulated against the risk of outrage in response to this type of public health work, but careful articulation of procedures, anticipating specific concerns, and two-way community-based interaction are promising mechanisms to reduce risk.