Using COVID-19 Vaccine Attitudes Found in Tweets to Predict Vaccine Perceptions in Traditional Surveys: Infodemiology Study

Abstract

Background Traditionally, surveys are conducted to answer questions related to public health but can be costly to execute. However, the information that researchers aim to extract from surveys could potentially be retrieved from social media, which possesses data that are highly accessible and lower in cost to collect. Objective This study aims to evaluate whether attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines collected from the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) could be predicted using attitudes extracted from Twitter (subsequently rebranded X). Ultimately, this study aimed to determine whether Twitter can provide us with similar information to that observed in traditional surveys or whether saving money comes at the cost of losing rich data. Methods COVID-19 vaccine attitudes were extracted from the HPS conducted between January 6 and May 25, 2021. Twitter’s streaming application programming interface was used to collect COVID-19 vaccine tweets during the same period. A sentiment and emotion analysis of tweets was conducted to examine attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine on Twitter. Generalized linear models and generalized linear mixed models were used to evaluate the ability of COVID-19 vaccine attitudes on Twitter to predict vaccine attitudes in the HPS. Results The results revealed that vaccine perceptions expressed on Twitter performed well in predicting vaccine perceptions in the survey. Conclusions These findings suggest that the information researchers aim to extract from surveys could potentially also be retrieved from a more accessible data source, such as Twitter. Leveraging Twitter data alongside traditional surveys can provide a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of COVID-19 vaccine perceptions, facilitating evidence-based decision-making and tailored public health strategies.