Debates over the role of Traditional Chinese Medicine on COVID-19: A computational comparison between professionals and laypersons in Chinese online knowledge community

Jinhui Li and Wen Shi

Social Science & Medicine, 2024, vol. 361, issue C

Abstract: Leveraging a large collection of textual data (N = 21,539) from a Chinese online community, we employed structural topic modeling to investigate the thematic disparities between professionals and laypersons, regarding the effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) on COVID-19. Findings reveal that laypersons are the dominant communicators in terms of discussion volume, who often focus on relevant news events, societal or political aspects of TCM. In contrast, professionals keep concentrating on issues related to medical expertise, and do not shift attentions as frequent as laypersons. Despite the dominant influence of professionals on laypersons’ agenda, two-way agenda interactions identified confirm that lay public is empowered to negotiate with elite professionals under certain topics. Our results provide novel insights into the dynamic nature of attentions, behaviors, and relations among prominent communication actors, and encourage future research to examine the individual-level and societal-level impacts of these constructs in the emerging online media landscape.

Keywords: Scientific debate; COVID-19; Agenda setting; Zhihu; Structural topic modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117366

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