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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Digital Public Health
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1404587
This article is part of the Research Topic Infodemic Management in Public Health Crises View all 13 articles

Generation paths of online public opinion impact in public health emergency: A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis based on Chinese data

Provisionally accepted
Teng Liu Teng Liu Xiangming Hu Xiangming Hu *
  • Beihang University, Beijing, China

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

    Public health emergencies can quickly provoke alarm and shock in the society, as well as generate high-impact online public opinion through network fermentation. Analyzing the generation mechanism of online public opinion in public health emergencies helps to explain its characteristics and laws. Based on information ecology theory, seven indicators from the four dimensions of information person, information, information technology and information environment are extracted, and the analysis framework of public opinion impact of public health emergencies is constructed.Taking 40 cases from China as samples, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to investigate the generation path and mechanism of online public opinion impact in public health emergency. The results suggest that: information person and information technology are the core conditions for the generation of high-impact online public opinion, but the harm level contained in the information itself is not sensitive to the generation of public opinion impact; There are four generation paths and three types that drive the generation of high-impact online public opinion in public health emergencies. This work enriches the cognition of the causality of public opinion impact in public health emergencies from the perspective of configuration, and clearly shows which combination of variables leads to high-impact online public opinion, and helps to prevent and reduce the risk of public opinion.

    Keywords: Online public opinion, Public health emergencies, Generation mechanism, QCA, public opinion risk

    Received: 21 Mar 2024; Accepted: 03 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Liu and Hu. 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: Xiangming Hu, Beihang University, Beijing, China

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