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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Monitoring how different people – as ‘social sensors’ – evaluate and
respond to crisis such as pandemics, allows tailoring crisis communication
to the social perceptions of the situation, at different moments. To gather
such evidence, we proposed a index of social perceptions of systemic
risk (SPSR), as an indicator of a situational threat compromising risks to
physical health, psychological health, the economy, social relations, health
system, and others. This indicator was the core of a social sensing
approach applied to crisis situations, implemented during the COVID-19
pandemic through a content analysis of more than 130.000 public comments from Facebook™ users, in COVID-19 related publications. This
content coding allowed creating a SPSR index monitored during a
one-year descriptive longitudinal analysis. This index correlated with
co-occurring events within the social system, namely epidemiological
indicators across measurement cycles (e.g. new deaths; cumulative number of infection cases; Intensive Care Unit hospitalizations) and tended
to reflect the epidemiological situation severity (e.g. with the highest
level registered during the worst pandemic wave). However, discrepancies
also occurred, with high SPSR registered in a low severity situation, i.e.
low number of hospitalizations and deaths (e.g. school year beginning),
or low SPSR in a high severity situation (e.g. 2nd pandemic wave during
Christmas), showing other factors beyond the epidemiological situation
contributing to the social perceptions. After each ‘crisis period’ with SPSR
peaking, there was a ‘restoration period’, consistently decreasing towards
average levels of the previous measurement cycle. This can either indicate
social resilience (recovery and resources potentiation) or risk attenuation
after a high-severity period. This study serves as preliminary proof of
concept of a crises social sensing approach, enabling monitoring of social
system dynamics for various crisis types, such as health crisis or the
climate crisis.
Description
Keywords
COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 Crises Social sensing Systemic risks Crisis communication
Citation
Gaspar, R., Toscano, H., Raposo, B., Godinho, C., Francisco, R., Silva, C., Arriaga, M. T. D., Domingos, S., Filipe, J., Leiras, G., & Pereira, C. (2023). Crises social sensing: longitudinal monitoring of social perceptions of systemic risk during public health crisis. Journal of Risk Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2023.2170450
Publisher
Routledge