Health Risk Communication During COVID-19 Emergency in Italy: The Impact of Medical Experts’ Debate on Twitter

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 emergency underlined the importance of an effective public health communication to limit the spread of the outbreak. Physicians as “public experts” can play a crucial part in health risk communication, even if their role is challenged by transformations into the information system. Therefore, the major objective of this study was to investigate public perception of medical experts’ opinions regarding the COVID-19 emergency. The Italian public debate involving medical experts in the Twitter sphere during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has particularly been examined. A content analysis was performed on 2,040 randomly selected tweets. The results of content analysis show that the medical experts who tend to mitigate the risk received a higher number of tweets supporting their positions when compared to the experts whose statements were aimed at intensifying the risk. Since a public expert is a communicator, but also an advisor who can affect how laypersons perceive and react to risk events, this study can provide more knowledge about the public perception of different communication strategies incorporated by medical experts.

Acknowledgements

The authors express their special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments. The authors also thank Renato Giugliano for helping them with data extraction.

Disclosure statement

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

Author contribution

AB developed the conceptual and theoretical framework, the study design, as well as she performed data collection and content analysis (the hyperlinks analysis and the engagement). RB and IR performed the content analysis and the qualitative pragmalinguistic analysis. All authors contributed to the writing and revising of the manuscript and confirm their contribution to the writing as follows: AB: Background, Method, Results, Discussion; RB: Results, Discussion, Conclusion; IR: Results, Discussion, Conclusion.

Notes

1. Experts were chosen on the basis of data collected by the monitoring center Mediamonitor.it (http://www.mediamonitor.it/). The center has monitored 22 national radio and TV stations, detecting which experts (virologists, epidemiologists, etc.) were the most present on radio and TV from February 21 to May 4, 2020.

2. According to Landis and Koch (1977), Kappa statistics < 0.00 indicate a poor strength of agreement; 0.00–0.20 slight agreement; 0.21–0.40 fair; 0.41–0.60 moderate; 0.61–0.80 substantial; 0.81–1.00 almost perfect.

Additional information

Funding

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