Geotagged US tweets as predictors of county-level health outcomes, 2015-2016

Q.C. Nguyen, M. McCullough, H.-W. Meng, D. Paul, D. Li, S. Kath, G. Loomis, E.O. Nsoesie, M. Wen, K.R. Smith and F. Li

American Journal of Public Health, 2017, vol. 107, issue 11, 1776-1782

Abstract: Objectives. To leverage geotagged Twitter data to create national indicators of the social environment, with small-area indicators of prevalent sentiment and social modeling of health behaviors, and to test associations with county-level health outcomes, while controlling for demographic characteristics. Methods. We used Twitter's streaming application programming interface to continuously collect a random 1% subset of publicly available geo-located tweets in the contiguous United States. We collected approximately 80 million geotagged tweets from 603 363 unique Twitter users in a 12-month period (April 2015-March 2016). Results. Across 3135 US counties, Twitter indicators of happiness, food, and physical activity were associated with lower premature mortality, obesity, and physical inactivity. Alcohol-use tweets predicted higher alcohol-use-related mortality. Conclusions. Socialmedia represents a newtype of real-time data thatmay enable public healthofficials toexaminemovement ofnorms, sentiment, andbehaviors thatmayportend emerging issues or outbreaks-thus providing a way to intervene to prevent adverse health events and measure the impact of health interventions.

Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:10.2105/ajph.2017.303993_8

DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2017.303993

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