ArticlePloS one
Online Work Force Analyzes Social Media to Identify Consequences of an Unplanned School Closure - Using Technology to Prepare for the Next Pandemic.
Article in PloS one. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Winter Storms and Unplanned School Closure Announcements on Twitter: Comparison Between the States of Massachusetts and Georgia, 2017-2018.Disaster medicine and public health preparedness · 2022Article
- Causes, characteristics, and patterns of prolonged unplanned school closures prior to the COVID-19 pandemic-United States, 2011-2019.PloS one · 2022Article
- Changes in activity and content of messages of an Estonian Facebook group during transition to distance learning at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.Journal of computer assisted learning · 2021Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundDuring an influenza pandemic, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may recommend school closures. These closures could have unintended consequences for students and their families. Publicly available social media could be analyzed to identify the consequences of an unplanned school closure.
methodsAs a proxy for an unplanned, pandemic-related school closure, we used the district-wide school closure due to the September 10-18, 2012 teachers' strike in Chicago, Illinois. We captured social media posts about the school closure using the Radian6 social media-monitoring platform. An online workforce from Amazon Mechanical Turk categorized each post into one of two groups. The first group included relevant posts that described the impact of the closure on students and their families. The second group included irrelevant posts that described the political aspects of the strike or topics unrelated to the school closure. All relevant posts were further categorized as expressing a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. We analyzed patterns of relevant posts and sentiment over time and compared our findings to household surveys conducted after other unplanned school closures.
resultsWe captured 4,546 social media posts about the district-wide school closure using our search criteria. Of these, 930 (20%) were categorized as relevant by the online workforce. Of the relevant posts, 619 (67%) expressed a negative sentiment, 51 (5%) expressed a positive sentiment, and 260 (28%) were neutral. The number of relevant posts, and especially those with a negative sentiment, peaked on day 1 of the strike. Negative sentiment expressed concerns about childcare, missed school lunches, and the lack of class time for students. This was consistent with findings from previously conducted household surveys.
conclusionSocial media are publicly available and can readily provide information on the impact of an unplanned school closure on students and their families. Using social media to assess the impact of an unplanned school closure due to a public health event would be informative. An online workforce can effectively assist with the review process.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
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