Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology
Date Submitted: Jul 8, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 27, 2023
Potential Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Public Perception of Waterpipe on Reddit: Observational Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Socializing is one of the main motivations for waterpipe smoking. Restrictions on social gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic might have influenced waterpipe smokers’ behaviors. As one of the most popular social media platforms, Reddit has been used to study public opinions and user experiences.
Objective:
In this study, we aimed to examine the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on public perception and discussion of waterpipe tobacco smoking using Reddit data.
Methods:
We collected Reddit posts between December 01, 2018, and June 30, 2021, from Reddit Archive (pushshift.io) using keywords such as “waterpipe”, “hookah” and “shisha”. We examined the temporal trend in Reddit posts mentioning waterpipe and different locations (such as home and lounge/bar). Temporal trend was further tested using interrupted time series analysis. Sentiment analysis was performed to study the change in the sentiment of waterpipe-related posts between before and during the pandemic. Topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to examine major topics discussed in waterpipe-related posts before and during the pandemic.
Results:
We showed that the weekly number of Reddit posts mentioning waterpipe significantly increased at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and gradually decreased afterwards. In contrast, Reddit posts mentioning waterpipe and lounge/bar showed opposite trend. Compared to the period before the COVID-19 pandemic, the average number of Reddit posts mentioning lounge/bar was significantly decreased, while the average number of Reddit posts mentioning home remained similar during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the waterpipe-related posts with positive sentiment was dominant, there is no change in the proportion of waterpipe-related posts with different sentiments between before and during the pandemic. Most topics related to waterpipe on Reddit were similar between before and during the pandemic. There were more discussions about the opening/closing of hookah lounge/bar during the pandemic.
Conclusions:
This study provided a first evaluation on the possible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public perception and discussion about waterpipe on Reddit, which could potentially help with future regulations on waterpipe tobacco smoking.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.