COVID-19 and its impact on the national examination for pharmacists in Japan: An SNS text analysis

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an extraordinary situation for undergraduate students. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the national examination for pharmacists in Japan. In this study, we analyzed the content of Twitter to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the national exam, including psychological aspects. Tweets including the words "national examinations" and "pharmacists" were compiled from December 2020 to March 2021. ML-Ask, a python library, was used to evaluate the emotional register of the tweets on the basis of ten elements: Joy, Fondness, Relief, Gloom, Dislike, Anger, Fear, Shame, Excitement, and Surprise. The presence of COVID-19-related terms was clearly visible in tweets about the national examination of pharmacists between December 1st–and 15th, 2020. It was precisely during this period that the government had announced a strategy regarding national examinations, in the light of COVID-19. The analysis found that post December 16th, words associated with negative emotions were mainly related to the examination, but not to COVID-19. As a result of analyzing only infected areas, a relationship between employment and negative feeling was detected.