From Hesitancy Framings to Vaccine Hesitancy Profiles: A Journey of Stance, Ontological Commitments and Moral Foundations
This work addresses vaccine hesitancy for public health researchers and policymakers by providing a detailed profiling method, though it is incremental in applying existing analytical techniques to new social media data.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding vaccine hesitancy on Twitter by analyzing 9,133,471 tweets to identify framings, ontological commitments, and moral foundations, resulting in the derivation of nine distinct hesitancy profiles from 805,336 users.
While billions of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, too many people remain hesitant. Twitter, with its substantial reach and daily exposure, is an excellent resource for examining how people frame their vaccine hesitancy and to uncover vaccine hesitancy profiles. In this paper we expose our processing journey from identifying Vaccine Hesitancy Framings in a collection of 9,133,471 original tweets discussing the COVID-19 vaccines, establishing their ontological commitments, annotating the Moral Foundations they imply to the automatic recognition of the stance of the tweet authors toward any of the CoVaxFrames that we have identified. When we found that 805,336 Twitter users had a stance towards some CoVaxFrames in either the 9,133,471 original tweets or their 17,346,664 retweets, we were able to derive nine different Vaccine Hesitancy Profiles of these users and to interpret these profiles based on the ontological commitments of the frames they evoked in their tweets and on value of their stance towards the evoked frames.