TY - JOUR
T1 - COVID-19 and communication
T2 - A sentiment analysis of US state governors' official press releases
AU - Tano, Mauricio
AU - Baek, Juha
AU - Ordonez, Adriana
AU - Bosetti, Rita
AU - Menser, Terri
AU - Naufal, George
AU - Kash, Bita
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Tano et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2022/8
Y1 - 2022/8
N2 - Objectives This study examines the contents of official communication from United States governors' offices related to the COVID-19 pandemic to assess patterns in communication and to determine if they correlate with trends for COVID cases and deaths. Methods We collected text data for all COVID-19 related press releases between March 1 and December 31, 2020 from the US governors' office websites in all 50 states. An automated parsing and sentiment analyzer assessed descriptive statistics and trends in tone, including positivity and negativity. Results We included a total of 7,720 press releases in this study. We found that both positive and negative sentiments were homogenous across states at the beginning of the pandemic but became heterogeneous as the pandemic evolved. The same trend applied to the frequency and tone of press releases. Sentiments across states were overall positive with a small level of negativity. We observed a reactive official communication to the evolution of the number of COVID-19 cases rather than responsive or preventive. Conclusions The findings of both positivity and negativity in press communications suggest that the effect of discounted importance was present in official communications. Our findings support a state-dependent optimal communication frequency and tone, agreeing with the curvilinear communication model of organizational theory and implying that feedback cycles between government officials and public response should be shortened to rapidly maximize communication efficacy during the pandemic. Future research should identify and evaluate the drivers of the large differences in communication tone across states and validate the reactive characteristics of COVID-19 official communications.
AB - Objectives This study examines the contents of official communication from United States governors' offices related to the COVID-19 pandemic to assess patterns in communication and to determine if they correlate with trends for COVID cases and deaths. Methods We collected text data for all COVID-19 related press releases between March 1 and December 31, 2020 from the US governors' office websites in all 50 states. An automated parsing and sentiment analyzer assessed descriptive statistics and trends in tone, including positivity and negativity. Results We included a total of 7,720 press releases in this study. We found that both positive and negative sentiments were homogenous across states at the beginning of the pandemic but became heterogeneous as the pandemic evolved. The same trend applied to the frequency and tone of press releases. Sentiments across states were overall positive with a small level of negativity. We observed a reactive official communication to the evolution of the number of COVID-19 cases rather than responsive or preventive. Conclusions The findings of both positivity and negativity in press communications suggest that the effect of discounted importance was present in official communications. Our findings support a state-dependent optimal communication frequency and tone, agreeing with the curvilinear communication model of organizational theory and implying that feedback cycles between government officials and public response should be shortened to rapidly maximize communication efficacy during the pandemic. Future research should identify and evaluate the drivers of the large differences in communication tone across states and validate the reactive characteristics of COVID-19 official communications.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0272558
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0272558
M3 - Article
C2 - 36040975
AN - SCOPUS:85137126615
VL - 17
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 8 August
M1 - e0272558
ER -