Measuring COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Consistency of Social Media with Surveys

Ninghan Chen, Xihui Chen*, Jun Pang, Liyousew G. Borga, Conchita D’Ambrosio, Claus Vögele

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We validate whether social media data can be used to complement social surveys to monitor the public’s COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Taking advantage of recent artificial intelligence advances, we propose a framework to estimate individuals’ vaccine hesitancy from their social media posts. With 745,661 vaccine-related tweets originating from three Western European countries, we compare vaccine hesitancy levels measured with our framework against that collected from multiple consecutive waves of surveys. We successfully validate that Twitter, one popular social media platform, can be used as a data source to calculate consistent public acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines with surveys at both country and region levels. In addition, this consistency persists over time although it varies among socio-demographic sub-populations. Our findings establish the power of social media in complementing social surveys to capture the continuously changing vaccine hesitancy in a global health crisis similar to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSocial Informatics - 13th International Conference, SocInfo 2022, Proceedings
EditorsFrank Hopfgartner, Kokil Jaidka, Philipp Mayr, Joemon Jose, Jan Breitsohl
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages196-210
Number of pages15
ISBN (Print)9783031190964
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Oct 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event13th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2022 - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: 19 Oct 202221 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume13618 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference13th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period19/10/2221/10/22

Keywords

  • COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy
  • Surveys
  • Twitter

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Measuring COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Consistency of Social Media with Surveys'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this