Measuring daily-life fear perception change: a computational study in the context of COVID-19 (Preprint)

BACKGROUND COVID-19, as a global health crisis, has triggered the fear emotion with unprecedented intensity. Besides the fear of getting infected, the outbreak of COVID-19 also created significant disruptions in people’s daily life and thus evoked intensive psychological responses indirect to COVID-19 infections. OBJECTIVE This study aims to develop novel digital trackers of public fear emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to uncover meaningful topics that the citizens are concerned about to inform policy decision-making. METHODS We construct an expressed fear database using 16 million social media posts generated by 536 thousand users in China between January 1st, 2019 and August 31st, 2020. We employ Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to detect the fear emotion within each post and apply BERTopic to extract the central fear topics. RESULTS We find that on average, 2.45% of posts per day having fear as the dominant emotion in 2019. This share spiked after the COVID-19 outbreak and peaked at 9.1% on the date that China’s epi-center Wuhan city announced lockdown. Among the fear posts, topics related to health takes the largest share (39%). Specifically, we find that posts regarding sleep disorders (Nightmare and Insomnia) have the most significant increase during the pandemic. We also observe gender heterogeneity in fear topics, with females being more concerned with health while males being more concerned with job. CONCLUSIONS Our work leverages the social media data coupled with computational methods to track the emotional response on a large scale and with high temporal granularity. While we conduct this research in a tracing back mode, it is possible to use such a method to achieve real-time emotion monitoring, thus serving as a helpful tool to discern societal concerns and aid for policy decision-making.

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Union struggle and the crisis of industrial relations in Italy

Capital & Class ◽

10.1177/030981680307900101 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 1-7 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Valeria Pulignano

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Social Policy ◽

Trade Unions ◽

Industrial Relations ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Union Power ◽

Social Dialogue ◽

The Social ◽

Policy Decision Making ◽

The Government

This paper argues that the Berlusconi government is seeking to replace the ‘social concertation’ arrangement between government and trade unions with ‘social dialogue’ in an effort to undermine trade union ‘power’. This endeavour by the government to impose a policy of ‘social dialogue’ would severely limit trade unions' influence in economic and social policy decision-making and leave Berlusconi free to introduce reforms favouring his friends in employer organisations. One likely outcome would be the deregulation of the Italian labour market strongly damaging workers' rights.

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Deliberative Policy Analysis

The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198747369.013.39 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 583-594

Author(s):

Frank Fischer ◽

Piyapong Boossabong

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Decision Making ◽

Policy Analysis ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Practical Method ◽

Theoretical Perspectives ◽

The Social ◽

Policy Decision Making ◽

Policy Problems

Deliberative policy analysis has its origins in the argumentative turn in policy analysis. It emerged as an alternative to the use of standard empirical-analytic methods of the social sciences to solve public policy problems. Not only has the conventional neopositivist approach failed to produce the promised results, it has generally operated with a technocratic, and largely an anti-democratic, bias. Basic to deliberative policy analysis is a method for bringing together a wider spectrum of citizens, politician and experts in the pursuit of policy decisions that are both effective and democratically legitimate. This chapter begins with an outline of the theoretical perspectives underlying deliberative policy analysis. Then, the process and practice is illustrated by the case study, which shows how the approach has moved from a theory to a practical method for policy decision-making.

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‘Bending the Rules’: The Space between HQ Policy and Local Action in UN Civilian Peacekeeping

Journal of International Peacekeeping ◽

10.1163/18754112-1704007 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 17 (3-4) ◽

pp. 293-312 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Diana Felix da Costa ◽

John Karlsrud

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Social Interactions ◽

Host Country ◽

Recent Literature ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Institutional Policy ◽

Policy And Practice ◽

The Social ◽

Policy Decision Making ◽

The Relationship

Recent literature has argued that a ‘dominant peacebuilding culture’ has precluded the contextualisation of peacebuilding to local dynamics. The article explores the ‘peacekeeping-peacebuilding nexus’ in practice, where civilian peacekeepers are increasingly considered to be early peacebuilders. Drawing on examples from United Nations (UN) civilian peacekeeping involvement in local peacebuilding in South Sudan, this article argues for a less reductionist and more nuanced view of local peacebuilding and the social interactions and dynamics which take place. It recognises the discrepancies between official UN Headquarters (HQ) policy and action in the “field”, and thus explores the relationship between policy and practice and the location of agency and authority in civilian peacekeeping. The article argues that the critique levelled against peacekeeping and peacebuilding for being focused on actors in host country capitals does not sufficiently take into consideration the relationship between capitals and the “field”. Rather, local peacebuilding outcomes depend as much or more on negotiations, bargains and compromises between different actors at the “field” level, than on institutional policy decision-making deriving from headquarters.

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Identifying customer knowledge on social media through data analytics

Journal of Enterprise Information Management ◽

10.1108/jeim-02-2018-0031 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 152-169 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Wu He ◽

Weidong Zhang ◽

Xin Tian ◽

Ran Tao ◽

Vasudeva Akula

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

Large Scale ◽

Social Media Analytics ◽

Data Set ◽

Social Media Data ◽

Customer Knowledge ◽

Content Type ◽

Customer Knowledge Management ◽

The Social ◽

Media Data

Purpose Customer knowledge from social media can become an important organizational asset. The purpose of this paper is to identify useful customer knowledge including knowledge for customer, knowledge about customers and knowledge from customers from social media data and facilitate social media-based customer knowledge management. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a case study to analyze people’s online discussion on Twitter regarding laptop brands and manufacturers. After collecting relevant tweets using Twitter search APIs, the authors applied statistical analysis, text mining and sentiment analysis techniques to analyze the social media data set and visualize relevant insights and patterns in order to identify customer knowledge. Findings The paper identifies useful insights and knowledge from customers and knowledge about customers from social media data. Furthermore, the paper shows how the authors can use knowledge from customers and knowledge about customers to help companies develop knowledge for customers. Originality/value This is an original social media analytics study that discusses how to transform large-scale social media data into useful customer knowledge including knowledge for customer, knowledge about customers and knowledge from customers.

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Emotions and Foreign Policy

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.417 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Thomas Dolan

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Foreign Policy ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Foreign Policy Analysis ◽

Collective Emotions ◽

The Social ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

Policy Decision Making ◽

And Behavior

Increasingly, scholars are recognizing the influences of emotion on foreign policy decision-making processes. Not merely feelings, emotions are sets of sentimental, physiological, and cognitive processes that typically arise in response to situational stimuli. They play a central role in psychological and social processes that shape foreign policy decision-making and behavior. In recent years, three important areas of research on emotion in foreign policy have developed: one examining the effects of emotion on how foreign policy decision makers understand and think-through problems, another focused on the role of emotion in diplomacy, and a third that investigates how mass emotion develops and shapes the context in which foreign policy decisions are made. These literatures have benefitted greatly from developments in the study of emotion by psychologists, neuroscientists, and others. Effectively using emotion to study foreign policy, however, requires some understanding of how these scholars approach the study of emotion and other affective phenomena. In addition to surveying the literatures in foreign policy analysis that use emotion, then, this article also addresses definitional issues and the different theories of emotion common among psychologists and neuroscientists. Some of the challenges scholars of emotion in foreign policy face: the interplay of the psychological and the social in modelling collective emotions, the issues involved in observing emotions in the foreign policy context, the theoretical challenge of emotion regulation, and the challenge of winning broader acceptance of the importance of emotion in foreign policy by the broader scholarly community.

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A Sentiment Analysis-based Expert Weight Determination Method for Large-scale Group Decision-making Driven by Social Media Data

Expert Systems with Applications ◽

10.1016/j.eswa.2021.115629 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 115629

Author(s):

Qifeng Wan ◽

Xuanhua Xu ◽

Jun Zhuang ◽

Bin Pan

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Social Media ◽

Sentiment Analysis ◽

Group Decision Making ◽

Large Scale ◽

Group Decision ◽

Determination Method ◽

Social Media Data ◽

Media Data

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The COVID-19 Pandemic: Informing Policy Decision-Making for a Vulnerable Population

International Indigenous Policy Journal ◽

10.18584/iipj.2020.11.3.10859 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

pp. 1-37

Author(s):

Nicholas Spence ◽

Vivian Chau ◽

Maryam S. Farvid ◽

Jerry White ◽

Paranthaman Rasalingam ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Indigenous Peoples ◽

Scientific Evidence ◽

Policy Decision ◽

Indigenous Communities ◽

Well Being ◽

Social Consequences ◽

Individual Level ◽

The Social ◽

Policy Decision Making

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted society. Vulnerable populations are at heightened risk for exposure, as well as adverse health and social consequences. Policymakers are operating under difficult circumstances, making crucial policy decisions to maximize impact and mitigate harm, with limited scientific evidence. This article examines the pronounced vulnerability of Indigenous Peoples in Canada to the pandemic. We highlight the importance of moving beyond individual-level risk factors associated with COVID-19 by identifying and classifying Indigenous communities most vulnerable to the pandemic. We propose the use of a social diagnostic tool, the Community Well-Being Index, rooted in the social determinants of health, to predict community vulnerability and potentially guide policy decision-making in the fight against COVID-19.

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