=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1996/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=Characterizing HPV Vaccine Discourse On Reddit
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1996/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1996
|authors=Yuki Lama,Dian Hu,Sandra Crouse Quinn,Amelia Jamison,David A. Broniatowski
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/amia/LamaHQJB17
}}
==Characterizing HPV Vaccine Discourse On Reddit==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1996/paper6.pdf
Characterizing HPV Vaccine Discourse On Reddit
Yuki Lama1, Dian Hu2, Sandra Crouse Quinn, PhD1, Amelia Jamison1, David A.
Broniatowski, PhD2
1
University of Maryland, College Park, MD; 2George Washington University, Washington,
D.C.
Introduction:
Approximately 23,000 women and 15,793 men in the United States are affected by human papilloma virus (HPV)
related cancers. Many of the infections could have been prevented through vaccination [2]. The CDC has
recommended a 3-dose vaccination series as a safe and effective method of protecting against HPV strains
associated with cervical and other cancers for girls since June 2006 and for males since October 2011. However,
vaccination rates remain low. Strengthening uptake efforts is a preeminent national public health concern, as
demonstrated by the Healthy People 2020 objective to increase HPV three-doses vaccination series completion for
adolescents aged 13–15 to 80% by the year 2020. In order to promote HPV vaccination through public health
communication efforts, the mechanisms in which individuals utilize resources related to health information must be
identified and understood. Surveillance of social media data can provide an alternative approach to observe patterns
of information dissemination and knowledge exchange as related to HPV vaccination behaviors [1]. Understanding
extant online discussions on HPV vaccination is pivotal in developing concerted, tailored health communication
efforts to enhance HPV vaccination rates. There is a growing number of studies contributing to the literature
addressing the nexus of HPV and social media data, but to date, no published study has examined Reddit content
related to HPV vaccination.
Objective:
We seek to observe the following trends using Reddit messages: (1) how the HPV vaccine is characterized on
Reddit— cancer risk vs. sexual behavior concerns; (2) how these discussions change over time.
Methods:
Based on the research question, all public Reddit comments were gathered from Jan 2006 to Dec 2015 to examine
temporal trends in the discourse on the HPV vaccine, using a custom scraper implemented in Python. The JSON
library was used to process raw data and the NLTK library was used for the purpose of tokenizing and stemming.
DateTime library was utilized to categorize messages based on their timestamp. During the extraction process,
messages were considered potentially relevant for further analysis if they contained the English strings “hpv” and
“vaccin”. After the filtering process, 22,750 potential HPV-vaccine related messages were identified. Qualitative
analyses of a subset of the messages were used to complement and guide trained classifiers. Two annotators
manually evaluated 100 messages using a qualitative codebook developed (see below). The evaluation procedure
attempts to categorize whether the message is discussing (1) cancer risks and (2) sexual behavior. Basic
demographic information including age and gender would be collected to discern the user base as well as any biases
inherent to the platform. Hand annotation is an iterative process with the aim of assembling 100 “gold” messages
that best represent the coded themes of interest mentioned. On the first round of annotation, raters coded
approximately 50% of the messages related to sexual behavior (inter-rater reliability: κ= 0.838; SE 0.055) and 59-
62% of the messages related to cancer risk (inter-rater reliability: κ= 0.726; SE 0.070). Upon completion of this
project, manually annotated messages will be split into training data and test data; 90% of the manually annotated
messages would be used as training data and 10% of the messages would be kept as test data. Consistent with the
categories listed in the codebook, we will next build a classifier that can automatically catalog the messages using
the codes identified above. In other words, the classifier will be able to analyze the entire sample, based on the
“gold” messages that were annotated, with a 75% accuracy to ultimately examine HPV vaccine trends on Reddit
over time.
Conclusion:
Using a combination of qualitative analyses and natural language processing techniques, this study investigates the
characterization of HPV vaccination discourse on Reddit over time, with particular focus on cancer prevention and
sexual behavior. Social media can be a tool to examine HPV discourse over time in order to inform the public
health promotion goal of increasing HPV vaccination uptake. Public health communication can harness the rapid,
low-cost dissemination capabilities of social media to deliver timely, accurate health information to the general
public.
Table 1. Qualitative codebook and sample messages
DOMAIN: DESCRIPTION: EXAMPLE:
Cancer Risk Messages are related to HPV and it's not just genital warts, the hpv vaccine can
relationship to cancer and HPV vaccine. prevent cervical cancer. amazing stuff.
This includes concerns related to cancer,
awareness of cancer risk. Comments can the vaccines don't prevent all causes of cervical
be any related type of cancer: cervical, cancer, they protect against some strains of hpv
throat, penile, anal, etc. which can cause cervical cancer. also, they only
started giving that vaccine to women over 25
recently.
General Sexual Messages are related to HPV and sexual seeing as he has already claimed that the hpv
Behavior activity including discussions of age of vaccine would make his daughters promiscuous
sexual debut, risky sexual behavior, and tried to stop it being made compulsory for
multiple sex partners, associations with girls, it would not surprise me at all.
promiscuity, etc. Messages need an
explicit connection to HPV. Can include thanks for clearing that up. i'm a guy, so it's a
screening behavior if it is related to little tough to wrap my head around. i might get
sexual activity. the vaccine just as a preventative measure. i've
only had one sexual partner in my history and
we were both virgins, so i'm certain i'm clear.
not that hpv is a death sentence or anything, but
i'd rather not have to deal with it, and so i don't
unknowingly spread it to others in the case that i
did get it.
References:
1. Dunn, A. G., Surian, D., Leask, J., Dey, A., Mandl, K. D., & Coiera, E. Mapping information exposure on
social media to explain differences in HPV vaccine coverage in the United States. Vaccine. 2017; 35(23), 3033–
3040. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2017.04.060
2. Reagan-Steiner S, Yankey D, Jeyarajah J, et al. National, Regional, State, and Selected Local Area Vaccination
Coverage Among Adolescents Aged 13–17 Years — United States. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2016;
65:850–858. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6533a4