University of Twente Student Theses
Tweeting about health technologies during the Movember campaign : Who is involved and how do they frame their discourse? : an exploratory study investigating the identity of Twitter users tweeting about technology and treatments of Prostate and Testicular cancers, and how they frame their discourse
Awlad Wadair, Balsam (2016) Tweeting about health technologies during the Movember campaign : Who is involved and how do they frame their discourse? : an exploratory study investigating the identity of Twitter users tweeting about technology and treatments of Prostate and Testicular cancers, and how they frame their discourse.
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| Abstract: | Cancer awareness campaigns like Movember have a great potential of effectively educating people about cancer and ways of its early detection. In the past few years, the Movember campaign relied on social media platforms such as Twitter to reach its objective of raising awareness about men’s health, in particular Prostate and Testicular cancers early detection and treatments. However, little is known on whether such online campaigns promote people’s knowledge and awareness about technologies and treatments for cancer. This article presents an analysis of the United Kingdom (UK) 2014 Movember campaign on Twitter and investigates 1) whether Twitter users are tweeting about technologies used for the detection and treatments of Prostate and Testicular cancers; 2) and how these users frame such discourse online. Furthermore, social identity theory is used to identify the profiles of those tweeting about technologies and treatments. The following study provides three main contributions to existing literature. First, the findings suggest that only 0:5% of the tweets from the UK 2014 Movember campaign are related to Prostate and Testicular cancers technologies and treatments. Second, results obtained from sentiment and semantic analysis show that Twitter users adopt mostly negative tone in their tweets and they frame their discourse around two main thematic clusters: generic treatments (such as Radiotherapy, Chemotherapy, Immunotherapy) and specific diagnostic techniques (such as Transrectal Ultrasound and Proton Beam Therapy). Third, people tweeting about technologies and treatments were predominantly classified into the ’Occupation’ social identity category. These findings offer basis for further research on the topic and provide practical implications for campaign organizations. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | TNW: Science and Technology |
| Subject: | 02 science and culture in general, 05 communication studies, 17 linguistics and theory of literature, 18 languages and literature, 44 medicine, 50 technical science in general, 70 social sciences in general, 71 sociology, 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | Advanced Technology BSc (50002) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/69813 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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