New media platform’s understanding of Chinese social workers’ anti-epidemic actions: an analysis of network public opinion based on COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Research on social public opinion of new media is currently an important interdisciplinary topic in the international academic community. Under the background of COVID-19, the major public health event of in China, this research took social workers as the research object who worked during the period of epidemic prevention and control. It referred to the international research on public opinion and selected 63 related hotly discussed articles and public comments on the WeChat public platform, the new Chinese Internet media. Moreover, the research conducted text mining on related public opinion with the 5 W communication model from public opinion evolution, text content, communication media, audiences, and public opinion influence, and used grounded theory building a development model of the generation of network public opinion. It also put forward the development needs of social work in the aspects of community resilience, social work practice, lack of public health social workers, and big data warning, etc., and pointed out that social work lacks its proper structural status in China’s public health system and emergency management system.

KEYWORDS:

• New media platform
• COVID-19
• network public opinion analysis
• social workers

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank anonymous reviewers’ kindly suggestions for this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Education Science of China’s 13th five year plan for 2017 youth project of the Chinese Ministry of Education (EIA170473)