Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 30, 2022
Date Accepted: Jun 7, 2023
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Evolution of General Public’s Perceptions of Child Abuse and Related Concepts: A Temporal Analysis of Wikipedia History Versions and Traffic Data
ABSTRACT
Background:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about 1 billion children are victims of violence every year. Researchers have explored the causes, impacts, and prevention of child abuse, but few studies illustrate the general public’s perceptions of child abuse and related concepts.
Objective:
To gain insights into the general public’s perceptions of child abuse, this study explored the internal characteristics and external popularity of this topic based on user-generated content online. Since the general public’s perceptions of a topic always change, this study also explored the internal and external evolution patterns of the topic from 2010 to 2017.
Methods:
The content of entries on Wikipedia can reflect the general public’s perceptions and focuses over time. Therefore, the child-abuse-related entries on Wikipedia were retrieved and their history versions, and yearly page views and edits data were collected and analyzed to reveal the internal and external evolutions of the Child Abuse topic. The entries were grouped into categories and the theme of each category were generated by open coding. The entries in every category were clustered by Self-Organization Map and the subjects of every cluster were extracted from the text of the entries by the n-gram technique. The subjects in different time periods were also compared to reveal the changes of the topic and themes.
Results:
This study collected and investigated 241 associated Wikipedia entries and their history versions. Four themes were identified: (1) Maltreatment (118, 50.0%); (2) People (28, 11.6%); (3) Problems (33, 13.7%); and (4) Protection (62, 25.7%). Nine popular subjects (e.g. abuse and violence, health issue, and social issue) and 17 sub-subjects (e.g. domestic violence, health organization, and family issue) were discovered and the subjects changed in three trajectories, which were growing, diminishing, and fluctuating. The page views of the themes increased from 2010 to 2014 and decreased from 2014 to 2017, while the page edits trend was decreasing during the investigated periods.
Conclusions:
The general public paid the most attentions on the harms done to the children, while cared about the children’s relatives and social relations less than other themes. The interest in man protection rose during the investigated periods, while the interest in woman protection reduced. The overall trend of the health information users’ interests in child abuse was decrease. Inconsistency was found between the health information creators and users in terms of the changes of their focuses. And the child abuse knowledge on Wikipedia was deficient, lacking the content about typical child abuse types, like medical neglect and sex trafficking. To serve the users better, the health information creators need gain more insights into the users’ focuses and interests, and generate more health information to fill the users’ knowledge gap. The system designers could create subject directories of child abuse and related concepts to help the general public acquire related information more efficient. It will improve the general public’s awareness of child abuse and will finally contribute to the protection of different groups.
Citation
