Description
Diet is not only a part of our healthy life but also an essential social activity representing our opinions and beliefs. To develop effective dietary intervention programs, it is necessary to have insights on geopolitical information. Traditional survey methods are expensive and fail to sample the populations without landline telephones. The growth of social media has provided a great opportunity to explore public opinions about common health issues. While the current studies have provided valuable insights, the geopolitical factor of diet has not been investigated on social media. To address this gap, this study utilizes a computational approach to characterize health opinions regarding diet based on the political orientation of the US states. We detected and analyzed topics of more than 850,000 diet-related tweets posted in 2016 and 2017. We found a significant difference among diet-related topics discussed in tweets originating from Democratic, Republican, and Swing states.
Learning Objective: Understand public's perception of diet based on the political orientation of the US states.
Authors:
Amir Karami (Presenter)
University of South Carolina
Alicia A. Dahl, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
George Shaw, Jr., University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Sruthi Puthan Valappil, University of South Carolina
Brie Turner-McGrievy, University of South Carolina
Hadi Kharrazi, Johns Hopkins University
Parisa Bozorgi, University of South Carolina
Presentation Materials: