Collective Information Seeking During a Health Crisis : Predictors of Google Trends During COVID-19

ABSTRACT

This article approaches collective health information seeking from computational method by investigating patterns of Google Trends data in the United States during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed factors that prompted a community’s curiosity, and information that communities were most curious about. The results of our cross-sectional and time-series-based analyses reveal a few salient findings: (1) Republican leaning states searched less frequently, and while states with more cases searched more, partisan lean is a more significant predictor; (2) States with greater level of poverty searched less frequently; (3) Leadership on the national level significantly influenced people’s searching behavior; (4) Communities were most interested in “local risk” information as well as quantifiable information. We show in this work that established individual information seeking theoretical predictors (risk) can predict online collective information demand and information seeking subcategories with important contributions from collective conditions (leadership). Health communication practitioners can design health messages and choose media channels more purposefully according to what people are most interested in searching.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2167578

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://usafacts.org/issues/coronavirus/.

2. https://www.nga.org/coronavirus-state-actions-all/.

3. Extensions of school closures (that they would continue longer) were not considered.

4. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2016.

5. https://www.kff.org/state-category/demographics-and-the-economy/.

6. We did not use one keyword in Mandarin, and another keyword “covid 19,” of which the searching results would be included in results from “covid.”

7. Since the pre-pandemic phase lasts 41 days, we make the pandemic phase comparable by truncating it after 41, thus ending it on April 21.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.