Public Attitudes Toward Violence Against Doctors: Sentiment Analysis of Chinese Users.

Background: Violence against doctors attracts the public's attention both online and in the real world. Understanding how public sentiment evolves during such crises is essential for developing strategies to manage emotions and rebuild trust.

Objective: This study aims to quantify the difference in public sentiment based on the public opinion life cycle theory and describe how public sentiment evolved during a high-profile crisis involving violence against doctors in China.

Methods: This study used the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm to extract key terms and create keyword clouds from textual comments. The latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model was used to analyze the thematic trends and shifts within public sentiment. The integrated Chinese Sentiment Lexicon was used to analyze sentiment trajectories in the collected data.

Results: A total of 12,775 valid comments were collected on Sina Weibo about public opinion related to a doctor-patient conflict. Thematic and sentiment analyses showed that the public's sentiments were highly negative during the outbreak period (disgust: 10,201/30,433, 33.52%; anger: 6792/30,433, 22.32%) then smoothly changed to positive and negative during the spread period (sorrow: 2952/8569, 34.45%; joy: 2782/8569, 32.47%) and tended to be rational and peaceful during the decline period (joy: 4757/14,543, 32.71%; sorrow: 4070/14,543, 27.99%). However, no matter how emotions changed, each period's leading tone contained many negative sentiments.

Conclusions: This study simultaneously examined the dynamics of theme change and sentiment evolution in crises involving violence against doctors. It discovered that public sentiment evolved alongside thematic changes, with the dominant negative tone from the initial stage persisting throughout. This finding, distinguished from prior research, underscores the lasting influence of early public sentiment. The results offer valuable insights for medical institutions and authorities, suggesting the need for tailored risk communication strategies responsive to the evolving themes and sentiments at different stages of a crisis.