Social Media Agendas and Research Agendas around Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities

Eugene Jang, Hannah Kinzer, Angelita Repetto, Minghui Wang

Abstract: Racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes are a critical public health concern and these disparities are linked to structural factors that limit healthcare access for marginalized communities. However, framing the needs of marginalized groups solely through the lens of social elites and traditional media limits our understanding of how people and technology co-construct discourse around racial and ethnic health disparities at the risk of perpetuating existing structural inequalities. In this study, we investigate the gap between social media agendas and research agendas on racial health disparities by comparing salient topics in Twitter discourse and academic literature. To do so, we conduct BERTopic modeling and Structural Topic Modeling on a dataset of 12,526 Tweets posted from 2015 to 2019 and 18,532 English-written research articles published between 2015 and 2019. A preliminary analysis found that emergent topics vary by racial group in both Twitter and academic discourse. Topics align with prevalent health issues for each racial group, yet there exists a gap between what is discussed on Twitter and in scholarly articles. For next steps, we seek to map the temporal change of topic prominence using dynamic topic modeling and conduct a time series analysis for causal inference between research agenda and social media agenda.