YouTube as a source of information: early coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of the construction industry

IF 3 Q2 BUSINESS

Construction Management and Economics Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI:10.1080/01446193.2022.2162096

S. J. Uddin, A. Albert, Mahzabin Tamanna, Abdullah Alsharef

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has been the largest global crisis in recent decades. Apart from the countless deaths and health emergencies, the pandemic has disrupted several industries—including construction. For example, a significant number of construction projects have been interrupted, delayed, and even abandoned. In such emergencies, information gathering and dissemination are vital for effective crisis management. The role of social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, as information sources, in these contexts has received much attention. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate if YouTube can serve as a useful source of information for the construction industry in emergency situations—such as during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The assessment was undertaken by distilling the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic as it relates to the construction industry from the content shared via YouTube by leveraging Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling. The investigation also compared the timeline with which relevant content was shared via YouTube and peer-reviewed research articles to make relative assessments. The findings suggest that YouTube offered significant and relevant coverage across six topics that include health and safety challenges, ongoing construction operation updates, workforce-related challenges, industry operations-related guidelines and advocacy, and others. Moreover, compared to the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the research literature, YouTube offered more comprehensive and timely coverage of the pandemic as it relates to the construction industry. Accordingly, industry stakeholders may leverage YouTube as a valuable and largely untapped resource to aid in combating similar emergency situations.

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YouTube作为信息来源:在建筑行业背景下对COVID-19大流行的早期报道

摘要新冠肺炎大流行是近几十年来最大的全球危机。除了无数的死亡和卫生紧急情况外，疫情还扰乱了包括建筑业在内的几个行业。例如，大量建设项目被中断、拖延，甚至被放弃。在这种紧急情况下，信息收集和传播对于有效的危机管理至关重要。YouTube、Facebook和Twitter等社交媒体平台作为信息来源在这些背景下的作用受到了广泛关注。本次调查的目的是评估YouTube是否可以在新冠肺炎大流行的早期阶段等紧急情况下为建筑业提供有用的信息来源。该评估是通过利用潜在Dirichlet分配（LDA）主题模型，从YouTube分享的内容中提取与建筑业相关的新冠肺炎疫情的报道进行的。调查还比较了通过YouTube和同行评审的研究文章分享相关内容的时间线，以进行相对评估。调查结果表明，YouTube在六个主题上提供了重要而相关的报道，包括健康和安全挑战、正在进行的建筑运营更新、劳动力相关挑战、行业运营相关指南和宣传等。此外，与研究文献中对新冠肺炎疫情的报道相比，YouTube提供了更全面、更及时的疫情报道，因为它与建筑业有关。因此，行业利益相关者可以利用YouTube作为一种宝贵且基本上未开发的资源，帮助应对类似的紧急情况。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Construction Management and Economics BUSINESS-

CiteScore

7.50

自引率

14.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： Construction Management and Economics publishes high-quality original research concerning the management and economics of activity in the construction industry. Our concern is the production of the built environment. We seek to extend the concept of construction beyond on-site production to include a wide range of value-adding activities and involving coalitions of multiple actors, including clients and users, that evolve over time. We embrace the entire range of construction services provided by the architecture/engineering/construction sector, including design, procurement and through-life management. We welcome papers that demonstrate how the range of diverse academic and professional disciplines enable robust and novel theoretical, methodological and/or empirical insights into the world of construction. Ultimately, our aim is to inform and advance academic debates in the various disciplines that converge on the construction sector as a topic of research. While we expect papers to have strong theoretical positioning, we also seek contributions that offer critical, reflexive accounts on practice. Construction Management & Economics now publishes the following article types: -Research Papers -Notes - offering a comment on a previously published paper or report a new idea, empirical finding or approach. -Book Reviews -Letters - terse, scholarly comments on any aspect of interest to our readership. Commentaries -Obituaries - welcome in relation to significant figures in our field.