Sentiment Analysis of Breast Cancer Screening in the United States using Twitter

摘要

Whether or not U.S. women follow the recommended breast cancer screening guidelines is related to the perceived benefits and harms of the procedure. Twitter is a rich source of subjective information containing individuals' sentiment towards public health interventions/technologies. Using our modified version of Hutto and Gilbert (2014) sentiment classifier, we described the temporal, geospatial, and thematic patterns of public sentiment towards breast cancer screening with 8 months of tweets (n=64,524) in the U.S. To examine how sentiment was related to screening uptake behaviour, we investigated and identified significant associations between breast cancer screening sentiment (via Twitter) and breast cancer screening uptake (via BRFSS) at the state level.