Damian Sendler: People’s attitudes toward health issues have shifted dramatically as a result of social media. A comprehensive understanding of how social media has impacted public health research is still lacking.
Damian Jacob Sendler: One hundred and twenty-five different research areas have been identified, including a wide range of diseases, populations, and other important topics in physical and mental health. In public health research, social media plays two major roles: first, it generates a lot of interest in public health research, and second, it provides a research context for public health research. Using social media for health intervention, human-computer interaction, as a platform for social influence, and for disease surveillance, risk assessment, or prevention is of significant interest in public health research. Even when it’s used only as a reference, recruiting participants, or collecting data, social media can be used as a context in public health research. The use of cutting-edge computational methods is rare in this new field, which relies heavily on both qualitative and quantitative research methods..
Dr. Sendler: Many aspects of people’s daily lives have been impacted by the widespread use of social media. A significant role has been played in health management and disease control in both developing and developed societies [1]. The use of social media in the prevention and control of a wide range of diseases, including infectious, chronic, and emerging diseases, has been documented [2-4]. People of all ages, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds have used social media to gather data on health-related issues, including children, pregnant women, and the elderly [5,6].
Agencies use social media to accomplish a variety of health-related tasks. Health information, links to health services, and communication with others who share the same interests are all common uses of social media for the general public [10]. Social media (e.g., Facebook, Grindr, mobile apps) is a multifunctional tool for public health professionals and organizations to launch interventions that efficiently reach a wide range of the population [11-14]. Public health management, including disease surveillance, assessment, and control, can benefit from the large volume of mobility and discourse data on social media (eg, Twitter) [15-17].
Research conducted on social media platforms with public health goals, including this study’s social media–based public health research, has seen an increase in scholarly interest. Social scientists and health professionals have made significant contributions, but the overall picture of how social media has been integrated into public health research is still incomplete. There have been previous systematic reviews on social media–based public health research that focused on a specific domain or topic. The effectiveness of social media interventions for a wide range of specific health outcomes, such as the promotion of safe sexual health behaviors [22], vaccine uptake [23], noncommunicable disease management [24], and HIV prevention [19], was extensively studied in numerous systematic reviews. Scholars tend to specialize in one or two areas, failing to see how social media can shed light on other areas of study. However, because they are narrowly focused on a single topic, these reviews have difficulty spotting patterns that are common across different fields and assembling a comprehensive picture of social media-based public health research. There were only a few original articles in the existing reviews [25,26]. Few studies were even found in a review of systematic reviews [18]. The limited literature included in this emerging and fast-growing subject area may not provide a comprehensive picture of social media–based public health research.
Social media–based public health research trends were presented in three dimensions: overall publication growth, specific disease publication growth, and journal outlet expansion over the past two decades.
Empirical research was very limited in this area for the first decade (2000 to 2010), which is shown in Figure 2 as a result. Between 2011 and 2018, there was a noticeable rise each year. As the internet, and particularly social media, evolved, so did these kinds of fads. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were all launched before 2010, but they have only recently gained widespread acceptance across the globe. Social media–based public health research is a field that responds to technological advancements, according to this study. Prior studies have shown that internet research has evolved in lockstep with technological progress [29]. [30]
Damian Sendler
Over the last few decades, social media has become an increasingly important part of research into a variety of diseases. When cancer, HIV and diabetes became more prevalent in 2010, there was an enormous increase in research. For the period between 2000 and 2018, the prevalence of other diseases such as flu and hepatitis A and B remained relatively stable while the prevalence of Ebola and the MERS virus increased steadily.
799 journals published studies in these areas, according to the journal outlets (see Figure 3). It is shown in Table 1 that there are 15 prominent journals in this field. In total, 331 articles were published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, accounting for 9.68 percent of the total number of articles. For this reason, the research in this area has also been covered in a number of sister journals of JMIR, such as the JMIR mHealth (165 publications), JMIR research protocols (114 publications), and JMIR public health and surveillance (49 publications). PLoS One, BMC Public Health, Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, AIDS and Behavior, and BMJ Open are also highly regarded, accounting for more than 1.5% of all articles published in this area.
On the basis of similar concerns and associations, the 25 research themes were grouped into six research clusters. It began with a focus on health education, which was divided into 4 sections: health education for schools and students, oral and dental health education for families, mobile health and patient decisions. The final section was devoted to prenatal health education. Preventing disease is the goal of health education, which aims to increase people’s awareness of and confidence in their own ability to care for their own health. Health education has traditionally focused on the classroom and the home as the primary settings for students to develop healthy health beliefs and practices. Increasing scholarly attention has been paid to sexual health education on condom use and pregnancy.
The second cluster focused on using mHealth to improve health management. Weight loss, diabetes management, social media and alcohol consumption, substance abuse, food and asthma, vaccination and immunization were all included in this cluster. mHealth and weight control Thus, social media can assist in the management of health issues. Using social media to influence unhealthy behavior and encourage the adoption of better ones is becoming increasingly popular.
The third cluster, cancer studies, includes women’s cancer, reproductive cancer, cancer survivors, and social media caregiving for cancer patients. Cancer is a major cause of death and a major public health issue. As a result, cancer research has received constant attention.
mHealth and HIV, men and HIV, infectious diseases, health campaigns, and HIV stigma all fall under the umbrella of the fourth cluster, which is focused on infectious diseases. In this line of research, social media provides new avenues to reach vulnerable populations and focuses more attention on campaigns to reduce the stigma of infectious diseases.
The fifth cluster dealt with mental health concerns. Both mental health and substance abuse and depression and digital technology are included in this cluster. There has been an increase in the prevalence of mental health issues in today’s society. When it comes to mental health problems, digital technology is both a cause and a solution.
Health and human mobility, health marketing, health surveillance, and eHealth–miscellaneous were the topics of the sixth cluster, which focused on social media-enabled extended health research. With the abundance of geographic data, large-scale user behavior data, and extensive online discourse on social media platforms, these research areas have flourished.
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: In public health research, social media is used to provide a new context for research or to generate new interest in public health research. In the early stages of using social media as a research tool, social media was only considered a reference, a platform for recruiting participants, and a data source. As a reference, social media was used primarily as a tool for health management and intervention when it was first adopted. There are a variety of ways in which researchers use social media as a platform for recruiting participants, including distributing questionnaires or posting recruitment announcements on sites like Facebook (Grindr for the men who have sex with men group). As a data source, social media could contribute to collecting data in text, image and video formats and collecting published posts and articles for meta-analysis or scope review.
Damian Jacob Sendler
Human-computer interaction characteristics, social influence platforms, disease surveillance and risk assessment or prevention can all be studied using social media when it generates significant interest in public health research.
The following are the four subroles that social media has been shown to play in research on public health interventions: First, a real-time interactive intervention tool that aims to alter personal and environmental risk factors for health; second, a one-way information distribution tool; third, a place where people go to find health information, such as YouTube and other platforms; and fourth, an experiment to see if social media platforms can serve as intervention tools.
In this role, social media was used to reveal (1) the public’s attitudes toward technology and social media for health use, (2) characteristics and behaviors of social media users and groups, (3) factors influencing the health behaviors or attitudes of social media users, and (4) consequences/influences on health behaviors caused by (popular) social media.
People and groups can change their health behaviors through the following methods: (1) building online support groups for patients, such as cancer patient groups on Facebook, (2) promoting physician-patient communication or information seeker–provider communication, (3) increasing the effectiveness of health-related marketing, and (4) changing public health behavior at a societal level through the use of social networking and social media. Social influence in online communities can be depicted using any of these methods.
Traditional quantitative methods dominated public health research with social media data, while cutting-edge computational methods had a minor impact. 30% used surveys, 24% conducted experiments, 22% used qualitative methods (eg, in-depth interviews and focus groups), and 8% used digital methods (e.g. text mining and sentiment analysis), as well as 5.6 percent of articles used traditional content analyses.
Using a bottom-up approach, this research provided an overview of social media-based public health research in the U.S. and Europe. This study concluded that (1) social media has penetrated almost all health-related processes and domains since 2010, showing a dramatic increase in the research body; (2) existing social media-based public health research mainly focuses on 25 themes in 6 clusters; (3) social media generally played two roles in this emerging research area by analyzing publication trends, research themes, roles of social media and research methods adopted. Scholars can gain a better understanding of the current state of research in this field, as well as what is being overlooked or overlooked. Scholars from different fields can learn from each other and work together to improve health and disease prevention. An in-depth look at three significant issues with theoretical and methodological implications for social media-based public health research is presented here.
Damien Sendler: In light of the rapid development of social and mobile media, social media has made its way into nearly every aspect of health care. Public health research has had to adapt to this dramatic shift in the field. According to previous studies, nearly one-third of internet studies since 2009 have focused on eHealth and mHealth, and there is a trend toward digitization in health care. It’s no secret that social media has revolutionized many long-established aspects of public health, such as disease surveillance, health promotion, and health education. There has been a significant shift in how people find and share health information, discuss health issues, and practice healthy habits as a result of the rise of social media Smoking cessation, substance abuse, weight control and HIV prevention are just a few of the health behaviors that can be changed through social media. Studies on social media and public health have concluded in the past that these domains of public health can benefit from the use of social media by increasing access to healthcare, facilitating online professional consultation, and enhancing the efficiency of healthcare delivery as well as prescription medication uptake [19,39]. Because of social media’s ability to lower intervention costs, increase user engagement, increase efficiency, and document the process better, a growing number of public health campaigns are incorporating social media into their efforts [40].
New areas of public health research have emerged as a result of the convergence of public health research with social media [41]: Research in the field of mHealth and social media-enabled health “Digital campaigns in targeted populations” and “surveillance and Twitter” are two common new research topics [42,43]. It’s possible to use user-generated content and geolocation information to predict outbreaks of emerging diseases or visually map their diffusion routes and locate the risky population [44]. [44] It is possible to study online health behaviors such as online health information-seeking, online social support, and online medical consultations through the digital trace on social and mobile media [45]. Furthermore, in the age of social media, certain health-related topics have attracted an increasing amount of attention. The study’s 25 themes include, for example, mental health issues as significant concerns. The adoption and use of social media may help or worsen mental health issues, but no one knows for sure [46].
An in-depth investigation is needed in this relatively new field. Public health research can benefit from new social media phenomena and new questions that have emerged as a result. Scientific research can help the field keep up with technological advancements and establish a realistic understanding of what social media can and cannot do in public health by responding to new phenomena in a timely manner. For now, public health researchers should focus on scientific questions raised by these new phenomena and address them either through the use of already-developed methods and information, or the exploration of entirely new approaches and resources.
However, when public health research meets social media, the dominant research methods are traditional quantitative methods, even though computational methods are becoming more popular within the field. Using social media in public health research can and should be expanded upon. Public health research is directly impacted by the potential of social media in recruiting participants and developing measurement tools.
Participant recruitment for public health studies is made much easier thanks to social media. Researchers in the field of public health face an uphill battle when trying to enlist the help of members of marginalized populations, such as people living with HIV/AIDS or those struggling with mental health issues [19,47]. Recruiting a large number of people from specific social groups to participate in public health surveys and experiments should be possible because of the size and diversity of social media users. The more important point is that participants recruited from online platforms such as Facebook and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk can have significant heterogeneity in their demographic characteristics (e.g. age ranges, genders, races, and cultural backgrounds) [48]. As a result, it is important to note that the representativeness of participants recruited via social media needs to be empirically evaluated in particular contexts. It is impossible to generalize Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers’ health status and behaviors to the general population in the United States. Researchers should exercise caution when extrapolating conclusions from their studies without first conducting an empirical assessment of the representativeness of the participants they enlisted on social media. Since social media is increasingly used to recruit participants, ethical issues have become more prominent and difficult. Social media anonymity makes it difficult or impossible to obtain informed consent from participants before they are recruited. Can researchers assume that when people accept the terms of service of a social media platform, they have given their explicit or implicit consent to participate in any experiment or intervention carried out on the platform [50]? This is an area where there is no widely accepted ethical standard. The scientific community must work together to set standards for ethical and responsible conduct in this new field of study..
Public health research can benefit from the use of social media because it provides new data on established concepts or new insights into emerging trends. In digital traces, rich semantic information can provide a social telescope [51] with which ordinary users can observe or infer what health information is generated, shared and consumed. For empirical studies on who connects with whom in various contexts, digital traces facilitate multiple social and interactive relations. More and more people are using social media to monitor epidemics or track emotional contagions. More and more studies are relying on social media user-generated content to keep tabs on new diseases as they emerge, in order to minimize their effects or keep track of public health trends [54-56]. Cross-validating new measures derived from social media data with established measures in the field of public health is essential when adopting new measures derived from social media data. Using Google Flu Trends as an example, it’s easy to see why cross-validation is so important. Traditional flu surveillance methods adopted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were outperformed by Google Flu Trends when it was first launched. Flu cases in the United States are overestimated by Google Flu Trends [58]. In public health and beyond, the validation of empirical measures is an ongoing process [59].