"Empathy for children is often missing": a mixed methods analysis of a German forum on COVID-19 pandemic measures.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The pandemic and its preventive measures disrupted daily routines and posed unforeseen obstacles for families. Users of public online forums chronicled these challenges by freely expressing their sentiments in unrestricted text-length formats. We explored a German COVID-19 forum to understand family perspectives and experiences of pandemic measures, particularly in terms of testing and vaccinating children. Our findings aim to inform future epidemic health policies.

Methods

We retrieved all 11,207 entries from a COVID-19 forum during its lifespan (June 2020 - December 2021), posted during the height of the pandemic. We classified the entries into topic clusters including general pandemic situation, testing, or vaccination using state-of-the-art text embeddings and

SUBMITTER: Nguyen VK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11470561 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature