Public Health Message Inconsistency and Guidance-Following

This research measures message content consistency among U.S. federal and state public health agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic. It then tests whether such message content consistency is associated with the diffusion of discordant information on social media. It also tests whether or not compliance with public health recommendations is related with message content consistency. Data include tweets from X (formerly known as Twitter), survey data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, and experimental data from survey participants. The project uses a three-pronged methodological approach: computational text analysis, a survey, and a survey experiment. With these research tools, it investigates the conditions, demographics, and mechanisms behind the relationship between message inconsistency and the spread of discordant health information in the American public. The study begins with a construction of a tweet corpus comprising COVID-19 pandemic-related tweets from 68 federal and state public health agencies. Using techniques such as word embeddings, binary classifiers, and regression analysis, it measures the relationship between message consistency in original agency tweets and the prevalence of discordant information in associated quote-tweets. Next, using a nationally representative survey with a survey experiment component, the study explores how exposure to inconsistent tweets regarding a (relatively unknown) disease impacts people's trust in the information being presented and their willingness to follow various public health guidelines. This survey is used to gage exposure to discordant public health information and message content inconsistency among U.S. adults, using an evocation-based measurement strategy to understand trust dynamics during emergency situations. Rigorous survey procedures, including psychometric tests and expert feedback, ensure the validity and reliability of collected data, with potential implications for future studies or public health crises. This project is jointly funded by the Sociology Program, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Program, and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.