Facts or stories? How to use social media for cervical cancer prevention: A multi-method study of the effects of sender type and content type on increased message sharing

PREVENTIVE MEDICINE

卷:126

Article

Zhang, Jingwen¹  Le, Gem²  Larochelle, David³  Pasick, Rena⁴  Sawaya, George F.⁵  Sarkar, Urmimala²  Centola, Damon³ 

[1] Univ Calif Davis, Dept Commun, One Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616 USA

[2] Univ Calif San Francisco, Ctr Vulnerable Populat, Div Gen Internal Med, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA

[3] Univ Penn, Annenberg Sch Commun, 3620 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA

[4] Univ Calif San Francisco, Helen Diller Family Comprehens Canc Ctr, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA

[5] Univ Calif San Francisco, Dept Obstet & Gynecol, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA

关键词: Social media;    Cervical cancer prevention;    Tweets;    Dissemination;    Multi-method study;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.ypmed.2019.105751

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Social media has become a valuable tool for disseminating cancer prevention information. However, the design of messages for achieving wide dissemination remains poorly understood. We conducted a multi-method study to identify the effects of sender type (individuals or organizations) and content type (personal experiences or factual information) on promoting the spread of cervical cancer prevention messages over social media. First, we used observational Twitter data to examine correlations between sender type and content type with retweet activity. Then, to confirm the causal impact of message properties, we constructed 900 experimental tweets according to a 2 (sender type) by 2 (content type) factorial design and tested their probabilities of being shared in an online platform. A total of 782 female participants were randomly assigned to 87 independent 9-person online groups and each received a unique message feed of 100 tweets drawn from the 4 experimental cells over 5 days. We conducted both tweet-level and group-level analyses to examine the causal effects of tweet properties on influencing sharing behaviors. Personal experience tweets and organizational senders were associated with more retweets. However, the experimental study revealed that informational tweets were shared significantly more (19%, 95% CI: 11 to 27) than personal experience tweets; and organizational senders were shared significantly more (10%, 95% CI: 3 to 18) than individual senders. While rare personal experience messages can achieve large success, they are generally unsuccessful; however, there is a reproducible causal effect of messages that use organizational senders and factual information for achieving greater peer-to-peer dissemination.

【 授权许可】

Free