Mental Health Discourse on Twitter: A Study of Essential Workers During COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on mental health and wellbeing, leading to large-scale lifestyle change, social isolation, and high stress. This has been especially pertinent to essential workers—from those in the medical field treating patients to those in retail supply chains meeting the needs of everyday life. In this work, we leverage Twitter to better understand the key issues related to mental health and wellbeing for essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role technology and social media can play in those challenges. By using phrases like “I am an essential worker” to identify essential worker accounts, we gathered all their tweets authored from January 2019 through September 2020. Overall, we analyzed 4,055 accounts — 1,752 essential workers and 2,303 random Twitter accounts to represent the average Twitter user as a comparison. We focused on general usage patterns, tweet sentiment, and the use of COVID-19 and mental health keywords to explore what Twitter can initially tell us about their pandemic experiences. We found that, during the pandemic, essential workers authored a higher ratio of tweets related to mental health than the average user but authored fewer tweets with COVID related keywords than average users. Most surprising, despite the level of stress and high demand put on essential workers, their tweets were more positive than the average user, when analyzed for overall sentiment. This trend was also consistent before and during the pandemic. Not only were essential worker tweets more positive than the average user, but this positive sentiment of essential worker tweets before the pandemic did not significantly drop during the pandemic. Instead, their positivity remained relatively consistent from 2019 through 2020. Although, we cannot definitively say what is driving this positivity, but it could suggest that characteristics of essential jobs may genuinely make workers happier or more positive—or at least present themselves more positively online. This initial study helps address how essential workers use Twitter differently than the average user, but more importantly, it provides us with new questions to ask about the underlying factors driving these unique characteristics. At the same time, it highlights how Twitter and other platforms can be used as a positive outlet and a tool for social support and potential social change, despite the negativity that is often expected in online spaces. From a technological perspective, this can provide new avenues for research focused on making these spaces more conducive to positive support in times of social isolation.
Papers
- Johnna Blair, Chi-Yang Hsu, Ling Qiu, Shih-Hong Huang, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, and Saeed Abdullah. Using Tweets to Assess Mental Well-being of Essential Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic. CHI’21 Extended Abstracts.
People
Johnna Blair
Chi-Yang Hsu
Ling Qiu
Shih-Hong Huang
Ting-Hao “Kenneth” Huang
Saeed Abdullah
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