Content Analysis on Homelessness Issues at Airports by News Media Mining

Abstract

The number of homeless people at airports has increased in recent years. As airports are safe, transit-accessible, convenient, and climate-controlled facilities with food and amenities, these places are attractive to homeless people who need a safe and secure place to stay. The main struggle of airports in this regard is maintaining a balance between customers, who are mostly the traveling public, and dealing with homeless people delicately. Moreover, because of their poverty and insufficient or no access to healthcare, these people suffer from physical and mental issues. With the COVID-19 pandemic, this problem became more critical. Many news media outlets started to report on homelessness at airports. News-framing impacts have some contribution in the context of this issue. However, the impact of news coverage on “airport and homelessness” has not yet been studied. News-framing effects have been identified in the context of tourist destinations. Although many studies have explored homelessness and transit, this issue at airports has not been well studied. This study provides a brief overview of the issue of homelessness in the transportation domain, including transit and aviation. Additionally, this study collected news articles related to “airport and homelessness” (71 articles) both during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 1, 2020–July 21, 2021) and before the pandemic (before March 1, 2020). These news articles contain around 50,000 words. As the data is unsupervised in nature, a text network analysis was performed to determine the latent information from these textual contents. The findings of this study can shed some light on this scientifically unexplored but widely discussed issue.