Variation in the timing of Covid-19 communication across universities in the UK

Alejandro Quiroz Flores, Farhana Liza, Husam Quteineh and Barbara Czarnecka

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 2, 1-25

Abstract: During the Covid-19 pandemic, universities in the UK used social media to raise awareness and provide guidance and advice about the disease to students and staff. We explain why some universities used social media to communicate with stakeholders sooner than others. To do so, we identified the date of the first Covid-19 related tweet posted by each university in the country and used survival models to estimate the effect of university-specific characteristics on the timing of these messages. In order to confirm our results, we supplemented our analysis with a study of the introduction of coronavirus-related university webpages. We find that universities with large numbers of students are more likely to use social media and the web to speak about the pandemic sooner than institutions with fewer students. Universities with large financial resources are also more likely to tweet sooner, but they do not introduce Covid-19 webpages faster than other universities. We also find evidence of a strong process of emulation, whereby universities are more likely to post a coronavirus-related tweet or webpage if other universities have already done so.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246391 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 46391&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0246391

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246391

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().