Exploring the heated debate over reopening for economy or continuing lockdown for public health safety concerns about COVID-19 in Twitter

Sina Shokoohyar, Hossein Rikhtehgar Berenji and Julianne Dang

International Journal of Business and Systems Research, 2021, vol. 15, issue 5, 650-672

Abstract: This paper explores US residents' opinion regarding whether to reopen for the economy or to continue lockdown for public health safety concerns, by analysing 1.3 million unique COVID-19-related tweets that are collected from March 11, 2020, through June 8, 2020. Tweets are classified into three classes: 1) in favour of reopening the USA for the economy; 2) in favour of continuing lockdown for public health safety concerns; 3) neutral tweets (providing facts rather than opinions). Gradient boosting classifier algorithm with the accuracy of 88% outperformed other classifiers, (i.e., logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, neutral network and multinomial naïve Bayes) used in this study. The result shows that US residents are becoming more concerned about the economic impacts of the lockdowns, and they are more in favour of reopening the economy as time passes. Managerial implications and directions for future research are discussed based on the state-by-state details of US residents' opinions and their trends over time.

Keywords: coronavirus; COVID-19; pandemic; public health safety; social media analytics; sentiment analysis; Twitter; classification methods. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=117316 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijbsre:v:15:y:2021:i:5:p:650-672

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Business and Systems Research from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().