Public Trauma after the Sewol Ferry Disaster: The Role of Social Media in Understanding the Public Mood

Hyekyung Woo, Youngtae Cho, Eunyoung Shim, Kihwang Lee and Gilyoung Song
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Hyekyung Woo: School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, Korea
Youngtae Cho: School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, Korea
Eunyoung Shim: School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, Korea
Kihwang Lee: Mining Laboratory, Daumsoft, Seoul 140-887, Korea
Gilyoung Song: Mining Laboratory, Daumsoft, Seoul 140-887, Korea

IJERPH, 2015, vol. 12, issue 9, 1-10

Abstract: The Sewol ferry disaster severely shocked Korean society. The objective of this study was to explore how the public mood in Korea changed following the Sewol disaster using Twitter data. Data were collected from daily Twitter posts from 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2013 and from 1 March 2014 to 30 June 2014 using natural language-processing and text-mining technologies. We investigated the emotional utterances in reaction to the disaster by analyzing the appearance of keywords, the human-made disaster-related keywords and suicide-related keywords. This disaster elicited immediate emotional reactions from the public, including anger directed at various social and political events occurring in the aftermath of the disaster. We also found that although the frequency of Twitter keywords fluctuated greatly during the month after the Sewol disaster, keywords associated with suicide were common in the general population. Policy makers should recognize that both those directly affected and the general public still suffers from the effects of this traumatic event and its aftermath. The mood changes experienced by the general population should be monitored after a disaster, and social media data can be useful for this purpose.

Keywords: Sewol ferry disaster; public mood; public trauma; social media; twitter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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