Analysis of the Evolution of User Emotion and Opinion Leaders’ Information Dissemination Behavior in the Knowledge Q&A Community during COVID-19

Xu Xu, Zhigang Li, Rui Wang and Li Zhao
Additional contact information
Xu Xu: School of Economic Information Engineering, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China
Zhigang Li: School of Management Science, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu 610059, China
Rui Wang: School of Management Science, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu 610059, China
Li Zhao: School of Economic Information Engineering, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 22, 1-18

Abstract: Since its emergence in 2019, COVID-19 has quickly triggered widespread public discussion on social media. From 26 February 2020 to 26 September 2020, this study collected data on COVID-19-related posts in the knowledge Q&A community, identified 220 opinion leaders of this community, and used social network analysis and sentiment analysis to analyze the information exchange behavior and emotional evolution of the opinion leaders during COVID-19. The results show that the COVID-19 topic community could be divided into seven main categories. The information dissemination of opinion leader information dissemination network had low efficiency, multiple paths, and a high degree of control. In addition, the emotional evolution of users showed obvious phased characteristics. User emotion changed from initially strong negative to strong positive over the course of the pandemic and eventually tended to be objective and neutral as time passed and the event stabilized.

Keywords: social network analysis; essence posts; knowledge Q&A community; information dissemination network; opinion leader; emotional evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/22/12252/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/22/12252/ (text/html)

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:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:22:p:12252-:d:684974

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().