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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Aging and Public Health
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1454287
This article is part of the Research Topic Health Literacy and Digital Health Literacy among Older Adults: Public Health Interventions View all 13 articles

Exploring public attitudes of Continuing Care Retirement Communities in China: A sentiment analysis of China's social media Weibo

Provisionally accepted
Xuechun Wang Xuechun Wang 1*Bo Xia Bo Xia 1Qing Chen Qing Chen 1Martin Skitmore Martin Skitmore 2
  • 1 Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
  • 2 Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The traditional family responsibility system faces challenges as China undergoes rapid demographic shifts with an increasingly older population. Recognizing the potential of market-driven senior care, Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) have emerged as a significant alternative. However, cultural stigmas and concerns about the quality, services, and health of older adults in these facilities raise questions over their broad acceptance. This study examines public sentiment towards CCRCs through sentiment analysis of 1,027,295 pre-processed Weibo posts. Utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) combined with fine-grained sentiment analysis and the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency algorithm, the attitudes and emotions reflected in each data point are analyzed, identifying key contributing factors, and exploring the underlying reasons. The results reveal a predominantly positive sentiment towards CCRCs, emphasizing factors such as the living environment and government involvement. However, areas of concern, such as potential fraud and health and safety issues, remain. These findings both shed light on the public's acceptance or resistance to CCRCs for stakeholders and highlight the potential of social media analysis in shaping older people's care perceptions in today's China.

    Keywords: Ageing, Continuing care retirement communities, Natural Language Processing, public attitudes, Social Media, sentiment analysis, Weibo

    Received: 24 Jun 2024; Accepted: 07 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Wang, Xia, Chen and Skitmore. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Xuechun Wang, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

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