“Mommy Blogs” and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites

Abstract

BackgroundSocial media offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore how people talk about health care at a very large scale. Numerous studies have shown the importance of websites with user forums for people seeking information related to health. Parents turn to some of these sites, colloquially referred to as “mommy blogs,” to share concerns about children’s health care, including vaccination. Although substantial work has considered the role of social media, particularly Twitter, in discussions of vaccination and other health care–related issues, there has been little work on describing the underlying structure of these discussions and the role of persuasive storytelling, particularly on sites with no limits on post length. Understanding the role of persuasive storytelling at Internet scale provides useful insight into how people discuss vaccinations, including exemption-seeking behavior, which has been tied to a recent diminution of herd immunity in some communities.ObjectiveTo develop an automated and scalable machine-learning method for story aggregation on social media sites dedicated to discussions of parenting. We wanted to discover the aggregate narrative frameworks to which individuals, through their exchange of experiences and commentary, contribute over time in a particular topic domain. We also wanted to characterize temporal trends in these narrative frameworks on the sites over the study period.MethodsTo ensure that our data capture long-term discussions and not short-term reactions to recent events, we developed a dataset of 1.99 million posts contributed by 40,056 users and viewed 20.12 million times indexed from 2 parenting sites over a period of 105 months. Using probabilistic methods, we determined the topics of discussion on these parenting sites. We developed a generative statistical-mechanical narrative model to automatically extract the underlying stories and story fragments from millions of posts. We aggregated the stories into an overarching narrative framework graph. In our model, stories were represented as network graphs with actants as nodes and their various relationships as edges. We estimated the latent stories circulating on these sites by modeling the posts as a sampling of the hidden narrative framework graph. Temporal trends were examined based on monthly user-poststatistics.ResultsWe discovered that discussions of exemption from vaccination requirements are highly represented. We found a strong narrative framework related to exemption seeking and a culture of distrust of government and medical institutions. Various posts reinforced part of the narrative framework graph in which parents, medical professionals, and religious institutions emerged as key nodes, and exemption seeking emerged as an important edge. In the aggregate story, parents used religion or belief to acquire exemptions to protect their children from vaccines that are required by schools or government institutions, but (allegedly) cause adverse reactions such as autism, pain, compromised immunity, and even dea...

Monitoring stance towards vaccination in twitter messages

“…: HPV vaccination) and split the antivaccination category into several more specific categories that describe the motivation of this stance. The diverse motivations for being against vaccination are indeed reflected in several other studies that focus on identifying discussion communities and viewpoints [18,22,20]. While splitting the data into more specific categories will lead to less examples per category, it could boost performance on predicting certain categories due to a larger homogeneity.…”

Researching with Twitter timeline data: A demonstration via “everyday” socio-political talk around welfare provision

“…Narrative analysis provides an apposite lens through which ethnographicallyamenable digital data might be viewed (cf. Chou et al, 2011;Georgakopoulou, 2014;Tangherlini et al, 2016). Lawler (2002) notes that narrative analysis focuses on peoples' usages of stories to interpret the world:…”

Toward a Generative Model of Legend: Pizzas, Bridges, Vaccines, and Witches

“…It may also be an artifact of the collecting process itself, where the field collector engages in a dialogue with the informant to solicit information which might otherwise not be forthcoming in performance (Palmenfelt 1994). Many of the stories also include some form of evaluation, allowing us to situate the story within the informant's repertoire, and world view particularly vis-a-vis social, economic, and political issues (Tangherlini 2013;Pentikaïnen 1978;Siikala 1990). Consider a story told by Marie Johansen, and cataloged by Tang Kristensen as DS VII, 134, Witches and their sport: Shot witches in hare or cat shape: Figure 6.…”