What kills us and what moves us: A comparative discourse analysis of heart disease and breast cancer.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Heart disease kills nearly 300,000 US women annually, while approximately 40,000 US women die of breast cancer. Breast cancer online patient communities are well known for their high engagement and emotional support. This exploratory study compared social media discourse on breast cancer with discourse related to heart disease.

Methods

Computer-assisted text analysis of two corpora composed of Twitter posts using #BreastCancer and #HeartDisease hashtags from December 2013 to December 2014. Lexical analysis (word and hashtag level) used AntConc software and lexicogrammatical analysis (style and stance) was conducted with DocuScope.

Results

The #BreastCancer corpus consisted of 592,046 posts, 57% of which were not original to the user (retweets). #HeartDise

SUBMITTER: O'Hanlon CE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6495432 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature