JMIR public health and surveillance
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JMIR Public Health Surveill · Jun 2017
Recruiting Young Gay and Bisexual Men for a Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Intervention Through Social Media: The Effects of Advertisement Content.
Web-based approaches, specifically social media sites, represent a promising approach for recruiting young gay and bisexual men for research studies. Little is known, however, about how the performance of social media advertisements (ads) used to recruit this population is affected by ad content (ie, image and text). ⋯ Facebook ads are a convenient and cost-efficient strategy for reaching and recruiting young gay and bisexual men for a Web-based HPV vaccination intervention. To help optimize ad performance among this population, researchers should consider the importance of the text and image included in the social media recruitment ads.
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JMIR Public Health Surveill · Oct 2016
"When 'Bad' is 'Good'": Identifying Personal Communication and Sentiment in Drug-Related Tweets.
To harness the full potential of social media for epidemiological surveillance of drug abuse trends, the field needs a greater level of automation in processing and analyzing social media content. ⋯ The study provides an example of the use of supervised machine learning methods to categorize cannabis- and synthetic cannabinoid-related tweets with fairly high accuracy. Use of these content analysis tools along with geographic identification capabilities developed by the eDrugTrends platform will provide powerful methods for tracking regional changes in user opinions related to cannabis and synthetic cannabinoids use over time and across different regions.
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JMIR Public Health Surveill · Jul 2016
Reaction on Twitter to a Cluster of Perinatal Deaths: A Mixed Method Study.
Participation in social networking sites is commonplace and the micro-blogging site Twitter can be considered a platform for the rapid broadcasting of news stories. ⋯ Twitter activity provides a useful insight into attitudes towards health-related events. The role of the media in influencing opinion is well-documented and this study underscores the challenges that clinicians face in light of an obstetric media scandal. Further study to identify how the obstetric community could develop tools to utilize Twitter to disseminate valid health information could be beneficial.
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JMIR Public Health Surveill · Jan 2016
The Importance of Computer Science for Public Health Training: An Opportunity and Call to Action.
A century ago, the Welch-Rose Report established a public health education system in the United States. Since then, the system has evolved to address emerging health needs and integrate new technologies. ⋯ As these technologies play a larger role in health promotion, collaboration between the public health and technology communities will become the norm. Offering public health trainees coursework in computer science alongside traditional public health disciplines will facilitate this evolution, improving public health's capacity to harness these technologies to improve population health.