A Mixed-Method Analysis of People’s Perception and Behaviour on Vaccination Program in Online Social Media

Abstract

Introduction: Social media has been a major source of various parties obtaining misinformation about vaccination programs and it has raised doubts about the vaccine, especially among parents. Vaccine hesitancy was listed as one of the top ten issues that threaten global health by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019. Therefore, this study aimed to examine sentiment on vaccines from Facebook pages, focusing on Facebook users’ views on vaccination programs through a mixed-method approach, which is a qualitative and quantitative combination analysis. Methods: This analysis uses all comments posted on Facebook pages downloaded using Facepager software from 01 December 2020 to 31 December 2020. R software is used to clean the comments and performed the sentiment analysis, while Gephi software is used to perform the semantic network analysis. Results: Out of 5,055 comments, the majority of the comments are negative sentiment (49.33%), followed by positive (32.58%) and neutral (18.08%) sentiment. For the negative sentiment, tolak, mati, and cucuk were the most frequent words ever used. For the positive sentiment, terima, setuju, and selamat were the most frequent words ever used. The positive network centered around the word dajjal focused on the word lab and FDA. In contrast, the negative network centered around the word vaksin focused on the word semulajadi and kerajaan. Conclusion: These findings are useful to understand the problem of parents who are skeptical of the vaccination program and also can be a guide for public health to communicate with the public through social media.