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. 2021 Jan 6;18(2):393.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph18020393.

Feeling the Void: Lack of Support for Isolation and Sleep Difficulties in Pregnant Women during the COVID-19 Pandemic Revealed by Twitter Data Analysis

Joey Talbot  1 , Valérie Charron  2 , Anne Tm Konkle  1   2   3
Affiliations

Feeling the Void: Lack of Support for Isolation and Sleep Difficulties in Pregnant Women during the COVID-19 Pandemic Revealed by Twitter Data Analysis

Joey Talbot et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Pregnant women face many physical and psychological changes during their pregnancy. It is known that stress, caused by many factors and life events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can negatively impact the health of mothers and offspring. It is the first time social media, such as Twitter, are available and commonly used during a global pandemic; this allows access to a rich set of data. The objective of this study was to characterize the content of an international sample of tweets related to pregnancy and mental health during the first wave of COVID-19, from March to June 2020. Tweets were collected using GetOldTweets3. Sentiment analysis was performed using the VADER sentiment analysis tool, and a thematic analysis was performed. In total, 192 tweets were analyzed: 51 were from individuals, 37 from companies, 56 from non-profit organizations, and 48 from health professionals/researchers. Findings showed discrepancies between individual and non-individual tweets. Women expressed anxiety, depressive symptoms, sleeping problems, and distress related to isolation. Alarmingly, there was a discrepancy between distress expressed by women with isolation and sleep difficulties compared to support offered by non-individuals. Concrete efforts should be made to acknowledge these issues on Twitter while maintaining the current support offered.

Keywords: SARS-CoV-2; mental health; pregnancy; social media; women’s health.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Tweets selection process flowchart.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) scores of the four identified categories. Note: Score from −1 to −0.05 are considered having a negative sentiment. Scores from −0.05 to 0.05 are considered neutral. Scores from 0.05 to 1 are considered positive. The middle line represents the median while the × represents the mean.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Thematic analysis and tweets repartition.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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