Sensemaking in a Networked World: COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This study aims to understand the collective sensemaking efforts and emotional reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine in Turkey between January 13, and January 22, 2021, as this time frame captured the initial days of vaccine rollouts and was characterized by high information ambiguity regarding COVID-19 vaccinations in Turkey. 45,759 tweets (written in Turkish) related to COVID-19 vaccine were analyzed. To analyze the tweet corpus, we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with a total of 30 topics based on the coherence scores, which were grouped into 6 distinct themes. The findings showed that Twitter users in Turkey made sense of the initial uncertainty regarding vaccinations by 1) discussing their vaccine hesitancy and rejection, 2) critiquing vaccine availability and priority groups, 3) critiquing the politicians getting vaccinated under the disguise of “incentivizing” the society 4) mocking photo sharing during vaccinations, 5) sharing unverified information about vaccination status and side effects 6) telling jokes about the vaccinations and vaccine side effects. Additionally, the sentiment analysis showed that the dominant emotions around the COVID-19 vaccine were negative. Theoretical implications are advanced for collective sensemaking framework, and practical implications are outlined to improve global communication efforts to eradicate vaccine hesitancy.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective sensemaking
• Twitter
• vaccine hesitancy
• public health

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gamze Yilmaz

Gamze Yilmaz (PhD, The University of Texas at Austin) is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her first line of research focuses on the cognitive and behavioral processes as they manifest in language use on social media. Dr. Yilmaz’s second line of research examines collaborative communication processes, and the role design thinking plays on creative team processes and outcomes. She designs and teaches courses on human communication and technology, creative collaboration, and communication research methods.

Mehmet Bilen

Mehmet Bilen (PhD, Suleyman Demirel University) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University. His research area covers artificial intelligence, natural language processing, hybrid approaches and bioinformatics. He also studies the development and optimization of machine learning algorithms, and teaches courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.