Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/3025453.3025891acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Public Access

Managing Uncertainty: Using Social Media for Risk Assessment during a Public Health Crisis

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Recently, diseases like H1N1 influenza, Ebola, and Zika virus have created severe crises, requiring public resources and personal behavior adaptation. Crisis Informatics literature examines interconnections of people, organizations, and IT during crisis events. However, how people use technology to cope with disease crises (outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics) remains understudied. We investigate how individuals used social media in response to the outbreak of Zika, focusing on travel-related decisions. We found that extreme uncertainty and ambiguity characterized the Zika virus crisis. To cope, people turned to social media for information gathering and social learning geared towards personal risk assessment and modifying decisions when dealing with partial and conflicting information about Zika. In particular, individuals sought local information and used socially informed logical reasoning to deduce the risk at a specific locale. We conclude with implications for designing information systems to support individual risk assessment and decision-making when faced with uncertainty and ambiguity during public health crises.

References

[1]
Ashley E Anker, Amber Marie Reinhart, and Thomas Hugh Feeley. 201 Health information seeking: a review of measures and methods. Patient education and counseling 82, 3: 346--354.
[2]
Dale E. Brashers. 2001. Communication and Uncertainty Management. Journal of Communication 51, 3: 477--497.
[3]
Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). Zika Virus?: Symptoms, Testing, & Treatment. Retrieved August 16, 2016 from http://www.cdc.gov/zika/symptoms/index.html
[4]
Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). 2016. Zika Virus?: Transmission. Retrieved September 13, 2016 from http://www.cdc.gov/zika/transmission/index.html
[5]
Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). 2016. Zika Virus?: For Pregnant Women. Retrieved September 13, 2016 from http://www.cdc.gov/zika/pregnancy/index.html
[6]
Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). 2016. Zika Virus?: Testing for Zika. Retrieved September 16, 2013 from http://www.cdc.gov/zika/symptoms/diagnosis.html
[7]
Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). 2016. CDC adds The Bahamas to interim travel guidance related to Zika virus. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2016/s0823-zika-travel-guidance-bahamas.html
[8]
C Charles, A Gafni, and T Whelan. 1997. Shared decision-making in the medical encounter: what does it mean? (or it takes at least two to tango). Social science & medicine (1982) 44, 5: 681--692.
[9]
Cynthia Chew and Gunther Eysenbach. 2010. Pandemics in the Age of Twitter: Content Analysis of Tweets during the 2009 H1N1 Outbreak. PLoS ONE 5, 11: e14118.
[10]
Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, Yvonne M Hunt, Ellen Burke Beckjord, Richard P Moser, and Bradford W Hesse. 2009. Social media use in the United States: implications for health communication. Journal of medical Internet research 11, 4: e48.
[11]
Munmun De Choudhury and Andrés Monroy-hernández Gloria. 2014. "Narco" Emotions: Affect and Desensitization in Social Media during the Mexican Drug War. In Proc. of CHI 2014, 3563--3572.
[12]
Camille Cobb, Ted McCarthy, Annuska Perkins, Ankitha Bharadwaj, Jared Comis, Brian Do, and Kate Starbird. 2014. Designing for the Deluge: Understanding & Supporting the Distributed, Collaborative Work of Crisis Volunteers. In Proc. of CSCW 2014, 888--899.
[13]
Elizabeth Cohen. 2016. Zika: Baby born in US with complications from virus. CNN. Retrieved September 1, 2016 from http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/health/micaela-mendoza-born-with-zika-complications-in-miami/
[14]
Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss. 2015. Basics of Qualitative Research Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. SAGE Publications, Inc.
[15]
Aron Culotta and Aron Culotta. 2014. Estimating County Health Statistics with Twitter. In Proc. of CHI 2014, 1335--1344.
[16]
Carolyn Crane Cutilli. Seeking health information: what sources do your patients use? Orthopedic nursing 29, 3: 214--219.
[17]
John O. Davies-Cole, Preetha J. Iyengar, Andrew K. Hennenfent, Sasha A. McGee, Vito R. DelVento, Fern M. Johnson-Clarke, and Anicet G. Dahourou. 2016. Zika Virus Preparedness and Response: Operational Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities. Pacific Journal of Medical Sciences 16, 3--11.
[18]
Huiling Ding and Jingwen Zhang. 2010. Social Media and Participatory Risk Communication during the H1N1 Flu Epidemic: A Comparative Study of the United States and China. China Media Research 6, 4: 80--91.
[19]
Anthony S Fauci and David M Morens. 2016. Zika Virus in the Americas--Yet Another Arbovirus Threat. The New England journal of medicine 374, 7: 601--604.
[20]
Julia Daisy Fraustino, Brooke Liu, and Jin Yan. 2012. Social Media Use during Disasters: A review of the Knowledge Base and Gaps. College Park, Maryland.
[21]
Vicki S Freimuth. 2006. Order out of chaos: the self-organization of communication following the anthrax attacks. Health communication 20, 2: 141--148.
[22]
Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella, Abdulrahman Alfayad, and Ingmar Weber. 2016. Social Media Image Analysis for Public Health. In Proc. of CHI 2014, 5543--5547.
[23]
Sean P Goggins, Christopher Mascaro, and Stephanie Mascaro. 2012. Relief Work after the 2010 Haiti Earthquake: Leadership in an Online Resource Coordination Network. In Proc. of CSCW 2012, 57--66.
[24]
Stephan Gundel. 2005. Towards a New Typology of Crises. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 13, 3: 106--115.
[25]
Christine Hagar. 2010. Farmers' search for information during the UK foot-and-mouth disease crisis - what can we learn? Australian Journal of Emergency Management 25, 4: 38--45.
[26]
Rossi A. Hassad. 2016. Zika: Health Education as Prevention-- An epidemiologist details The Health Belief Model. MedPage Today. Retrieved from http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/ZikaVirus/60129
[27]
Daniel E. Hellmann, Carleen F. Maitland, and Andrea H Tapia. 2016. Collaborative Analytics and Brokering in Digital Humanitarian Response. In Proc. of CSCW 2016, 1282--1292.
[28]
Thomas Heverin and Lisl Zach. 2012. Use of microblogging for collective sense-making during violent crises: A study of three campus shootings. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63, 1: 34--47.
[29]
Y. Linlin Huang, Kate Starbird, Mania Orand, Stephanie A. Stanek, and Heather T. Pedersen. 2015. Connected through crisis: emotional proximity and the spread of misinformation online. In Proc. of CSCW 2015, 969--980.
[30]
Amanda L. Hughes, Lise A. A. St. Denis, Leysia Palen, and Kenneth M. Anderson. 2014. Online public communications by police & fire services during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy. In Proc. of CHI 2014, 1505--1514.
[31]
Amanda L. Hughes and Leysia Palen. 2012. The Evolving Role of the Public Information Officer: An Examination of Social Media in Emergency Management. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 9, 1.
[32]
Amanda L. Hughes, Leysia Palen, and Steve Peterson. 2014. Social Media and Emergency Management. In Critical Issues in Disaster Science and Management: A Dialogue Between Researchers and Practitioners, Joseph E. Trainor and Tony Subbio (eds.). Federal Emergency Management Agency, 349--392.
[33]
Jina Huh, David W McDonald, Andrea Hartzler, and Wanda Pratt. 2013. Patient moderator interaction in online health communities. Proc. of AMIA 2013 Symposium 2013: 627--636.
[34]
Muhammad Imran, Carlos Castillo, Fernando Diaz, and Sarah Vieweg. 2015. Processing Social Media Messages in Mass Emergency. ACM Computing Surveys 47, 4: 1--38.
[35]
E A G Joosten, L DeFuentes-Merillas, G H de Weert, T Sensky, C P F van der Staak, and C A J de Jong. 2008. Systematic review of the effects of shared decision-making on patient satisfaction, treatment adherence and health status. Psychotherapy and psychosomatics 77, 4: 219--226.
[36]
Shaheen Kanthawala, Amber Vermeesch, Barbara Given, and Jina Huh. 2016. Answers to Health Questions: Internet Search Results Versus Online Health Community Responses. Journal of medical Internet research 18, 4: e95.
[37]
Marina Kogan, Leysia Palen, and Kenneth M. Anderson. 2015. Think Local, Retweet Global: Retweeting by the Geographically-Vulnerable during Hurricane Sandy. In Proc. of CSCW 2015, 981--993.
[38]
Wendy Macias, Karen Hilyard, and Vicki Freimuth. 2009. Blog Functions as Risk and Crisis Communication During Hurricane Katrina. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 15, 1: 1--31.
[39]
Lena Mamykina, Drashko Nakikj, and Noemie Elhadad. 2015. Collective Sensemaking in Online Health Forums. In Proc. of CHI 2015, 3217--3226.
[40]
Gloria Mark, Mossaab Bagdouri, Leysia Palen, James Martin, Ban Al-Ani, and Kenneth Anderson. 2012. Blogs as a Collective War Diary. In Proc. of CSCW 2012, 37--46.
[41]
Gloria J. Mark, Ban Al-Ani, and Bryan Semaan. 2009. Resilience Through Technology Adoption: Merging the Old and the New in Iraq. In Proc. of CHI 2009, 689--698.
[42]
Victor M Montori, Amiram Gafni, and Cathy Charles. 2006. A shared treatment decision-making approach between patients with chronic conditions and their clinicians: the case of diabetes. Health expectations?: an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy 9, 1: 25--36.
[43]
S Anne Moorhead, Diane E Hazlett, Laura Harrison, Jennifer K Carroll, Anthea Irwin, and Ciska Hoving. 2013. A new dimension of health care: systematic review of the uses, benefits, and limitations of social media for health communication. Journal of medical Internet research 15, 4: e85.
[44]
Robert Munro, Lucky Gunasekara, Stephanie Nevins, Lalith Polepeddi, and Evan Rosen. 2012. Tracking Epidemics with Natural Language Processing and Crowdsourcing. In 2012 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium Series, 52--58.
[45]
Leysia Palen and Kenneth M. Anderson. 2016. Crisis informatics-New data for extraordinary times. Science 353, 6296 224--225.
[46]
Leysia Palen, Sarah Vieweg, Jeannette Sutton, Sophia B. Liu, and Amanda L. Hughes. 2007. Crisis Informatics: Studying Crisis in a Networked World.". In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on E-Social Science.
[47]
Ambarish Pandey, Nivedita Patni, Mansher Singh, Akshay Sood, and Gayatri Singh. 2010. YouTube as a source of information on the H1N1 influenza pandemic. American journal of preventive medicine 38, 3: e1--3.
[48]
Michael J. Paul and Mark Dredze. 2011. You Are What You Tweet?: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health. Proceedings of the 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 265--272.
[49]
Claire H. Procopio and Steven T. Procopio. 2007. Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Internet Communication, Geographic Community, and Social Capital in Crisis. Journal of Applied Communication Research 35, 1: 67--87.
[50]
Yan Qu, Chen Huang, Pengyi Zhang, and Jun Zhang. 2011. Microblogging after a Major Disaster in China: A Case Study of the 2010 Yushu Earthquake. In Proc. of CSCW 2011, 25--34.
[51]
Yan Qu, Philip Fei Wu, and Xiaoqing Wang. 2009. Online Community Response to Major Disaster: A Study of Tianya Forum in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. In Proc. of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1--11.
[52]
A Rubin. 2009. The uses-and -gratification perspective of media effects. In Media effects: Advances in theory and research (3rd ed.), Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver (eds.). Routledge, New York,; London, 165--184.
[53]
Lila J Finney Rutten, Neeraj K Arora, Alexis D Bakos, Noreen Aziz, and Julia Rowland. 2005. Information needs and sources of information among cancer patients: a systematic review of research (1980--2003). Patient education and counseling 57, 3: 250--261.
[54]
Aleksandra Sarcevic, Leysia Palen, Joanne White, Kate Starbird, Mossaab Bagdouri, and Kenneth Anderson. 2012. Beacons of Hope in Decentralized Coordination: Learning from On-the-Ground Medical Twitterers During the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. In Proc. of CSCW 2012, 47--56.
[55]
Nadine B. Sarter and David D. Woods. 1991. Situation Awareness: A Critical But Ill-Defined Phenomenon. The International Journal of Aviation Psychology 1, 1: 45--57.
[56]
Rebecca Say, Madeleine Murtagh, and Richard Thomson. 2006. Patients' preference for involvement in medical decision making: a narrative review. Patient education and counseling 60, 2: 102--14.
[57]
Bryan Semaan and Gloria Mark. 2012. "Facebooking" towards crisis recovery and beyond: disruption as an opportunity. In Proc. of CSCW 2012, 27--36.
[58]
Irina Shklovski, Leysia Palen, and Jeannette Sutton. 2008. Finding community through information and communication technology in disaster response. In Proc. of CSCW 2008, 127--136.
[59]
Dawn Stacey, France Légaré, Nananda F Col, Carol L Bennett, Michael J Barry, Karen B Eden, Margaret Holmes-Rovner, Hilary Llewellyn-Thomas, Anne Lyddiatt, Richard Thomson, Lyndal Trevena, and Julie H C Wu. 2014. Decision aids for people facing health treatment or screening decisions. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews, 1: CD001431.
[60]
Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen. 2010. Pass it on?: Retweeting in mass emergency. In Proc. of ISCRAM 2010, 1--10.
[61]
Kate Starbird, Leysia Palen, Amanda L. Hughes, and Sarah Vieweg. 2010. Chatter on the red: what hazards threat reveals about the social life of microblogged information. In Proc. of CSCW 2010, 241--250.
[62]
Kate Starbird, Leysia Palen, Sophia B. Liu, Sarah Vieweg, Amanda Hughes, Aaron Schram, Kenneth Mark Anderson, Mossaab Bagdouri, Joanne White, Casey McTaggart, and Chris Schenk. 2012. Promoting structured data in citizen communications during disaster response: an account of strategies for diffusion of the "Tweak the Tweet" syntax. In Crisis Information Management. Elsevier, 43--63.
[63]
Kate Starbird, Emma Spiro, Isabelle Edwards, Kaitlyn Zhou, Jim Maddock, and Sindhuja Narasimhan. 2016. Could This Be True?: I Think So! Expressed Uncertainty in Online Rumoring. In Proc. of CHI 2016, 360--371.
[64]
P C Tang and C Newcomb. 1998. Informing patients: a guide for providing patient health information. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association?: JAMIA 5, 6: 563--570.
[65]
Kenton T. Unruh, Meredith Skeels, Andrea Civan-Hartzler, and Wanda Pratt. 2010. Transforming Clinic Environments into Information Workspaces for Patients. In Proc. of CHI 2010, 183--192.
[66]
Sarah Vieweg, Amanda L. Hughes, Kate Starbird, and Leysia Palen. 2010. Microblogging during two natural hazards events. In Proc. of CHI 2010, 1079--1088.
[67]
Sarah Vieweg, Leysia Palen, Sophia B. Liu, Amanda L. Hughes, and Jeannette Sutton. 2008. Collective Intelligence in Disaster: Examination of the Phenomenon in the Aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting. In Proc. of ISCRAM 2009.
[68]
R Villa. 2016. Zika, or the burden of uncertainty. La Clinica terapeutica 167, 1: 7--9.
[69]
World Health Organization. 2016. Zika virus and complications. Retrieved September 6, 2016 from http://www.who.int/emergencies/zika-virus/en/

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Virtual healthcare communities of practice: An Italian experience during the Covid-19 pandemicMECOSAN10.3280/mesa2023-125oa16833(11-28)Online publication date: Feb-2024
  • (2024)Images Connect Us Together: Navigating a COVID-19 Local Outbreak in China Through Social Media ImagesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373498:CSCW1(1-32)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Use of ICTs during ongoing protracted socio-political disruptionsExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3638194(1-6)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Managing Uncertainty: Using Social Media for Risk Assessment during a Public Health Crisis

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 02 May 2017

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Badges

    • Honorable Mention

    Author Tags

    1. Zika virus
    2. crisis informatics
    3. decision-making
    4. online forums
    5. public health
    6. risk assessment
    7. social media
    8. uncertainty reduction

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    Conference

    CHI '17
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

    Upcoming Conference

    CHI 2025
    ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2025
    Yokohama , Japan

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)369
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)49
    Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Virtual healthcare communities of practice: An Italian experience during the Covid-19 pandemicMECOSAN10.3280/mesa2023-125oa16833(11-28)Online publication date: Feb-2024
    • (2024)Images Connect Us Together: Navigating a COVID-19 Local Outbreak in China Through Social Media ImagesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373498:CSCW1(1-32)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
    • (2024)Use of ICTs during ongoing protracted socio-political disruptionsExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3638194(1-6)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)From Adolescents' Eyes: Assessing an Indicator-Based Intervention to Combat Misinformation on TikTokProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642264(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Writing out the Storm: Designing and Evaluating Tools for Weather Risk MessagingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641926(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Social Media Health-Related Information Credibility and Reliability: An Integrated User Perceived Quality AssessmentIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2022.322518271(5018-5029)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2024)The Innovative Impact of Trust in Social Government: An Analysis During COVID-19 CrisisIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2021.313022271(549-559)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2024)Expressing Uncertainty and Risk About the Mpox Outbreak: A Textual Analysis of Twitter MessagingCommunication Studies10.1080/10510974.2024.231143375:3(283-301)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Combating information warfare: state and trends in user-centred countermeasures against fake news and misinformationBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.2442486(1-14)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Misleading information in crises: exploring content-specific indicators on Twitter from a user perspectiveBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.2373166(1-34)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Login options

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media