Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

5-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Business Administration

First Advisor

Dr. Bin Wang

Second Advisor

Dr. Murad Moqbel

Third Advisor

Dr. Jun Sun

Abstract

Health-related topics are discussed widely on different social networking sites. These discussions and their related aspects can reveal significant insights and patterns that are worth studying and understanding. In this dissertation, we explore the patterns of mandatory and voluntary vaccine online discussions including the topics discussed, the words correlated with each of them, and the sentiment expressed. Moreover, we explore the role opinion leaders play in the health discussion and their impact on participation in a particular discussion. Opinion leaders are determined, and their impact on discussion participation is differentiated based on their different characteristics such as their connections and locations in the social network, their content, and their sentiment. We apply social network analysis, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, machine learning, econometric analysis, and other techniques to analyze the collected data from Reddit. The results of our analyses show that sentiment is an important factor in health discussion, and it varies between different types of discussions. In addition, we identified the main topics discussed for each vaccine. Furthermore, the results of our study found that global opinion leaders have more influence compared to local opinion leaders in elevating the health discussion. Our study has important theoretical and practical implications.

Comments

Copyright 2023 Massara Alazazi. All Rights Reserved.

https://go.openathens.net/redirector/utrgv.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/themes-participants-role-online-health-discussion/docview/2842764431/se-2?accountid=7119

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