Social Media and Public Health

About the Project

The research conducted over the course of the 2021- 2022 school year in collaboration with the Central Coast Data Science Fellowship had three distinct parts that were split across three quarters of the school year. The first portion was a continuation of a previous student’s work with building a classifier for predicting support of the HPV vaccine from a sample of Instagram posts. Since the previous student’s work, the results from the model were quantified and written up in a research paper. The paper will go under review in hopes of being published.

The second portion of the research was in collaboration with the kinesiology/public health department and involved the analysis of survey data pertaining to COVID-19.

Finally, the current goal of the research it to continue with the classification of user’s attitudes about the HPV vaccine and scrape Twitter for tweets relating to HPV in hopes to analyze support for the vaccine amongst Twitter users.