Using emotional text mining to assess the culture of blood donation in Italy

Abstract

This paper presents an application of Emotional Text Mining (ETM) to blood donation culture. We collected all the articles from two important Italian newspapers published from January 2016 to March 2021, regarding blood donation. The ETM analysis of the collected corpus identified a great variety of keywords characterizing the Italian culture of blood dona-tion, organized in 7 clusters and positioned in a 6-dimensional factorial space, that allowed us to formulate a series of considerations regarding: the dimension of emergency and related de-fense mechanisms, the issues brought by COVID-19, the cultural importance of the organizational dimension, the perceived role of the common citizen, and the role of volunteering in healthcare. The results obtained via ETM can be used to better understand culture-specific blood donation representations, and to consequently act on donor motivation in a more fo-cused way. The approach is of general validity and can be applied to other national contexts.