Disparate impacts on online information access during the Covid-19 pandemic

  1. Jina Suh
  2. Eric Horvitz
  3. Ryen W. White
  4. Tim Althoff

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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated important changes in online information access as digital engagement became necessary to meet the demand for health, economic, and educational resources. Our analysis of 55 billion everyday web search interactions during the pandemic across 25,150 US ZIP codes reveals that the extent to which different communities of internet users enlist digital resources varies based on socioeconomic and environmental factors. For example, we find that ZIP codes with lower income intensified their access to health information to a smaller extent than ZIP codes with higher income. We show that ZIP codes with higher proportions of Black or Hispanic residents intensified their access to unemployment resources to a greater extent, while revealing patterns of unemployment site visits unseen by the claims data. Such differences frame important questions on the relationship between differential information search behaviors and the downstream real-world implications on more and less advantaged populations.

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  1. Version published to 10.1038/s41467-022-34592-z
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.09.14.21263545v2 on medRxiv
  3. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.14.21263545: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Under Healthcare Access and Quality, we included the percentage of population with health insurance coverage (Table B27001).
    Under Healthcare
    suggested: None
    We use the MatchIt package84 with the nearest neighbor method and Mahalanobis distance measure to perform the matching.
    MatchIt
    suggested: None

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    We note the inherent limitations of studying digital engagement using digitally obtained data: This and other studies with online data can inadvertently exclude those who leave no or very little digital footprint3. Our information sources provide signals about levels of activity, but we cannot study details of changes in types of access if there is no engagement. Our analysis is also limited to the footprint of Bing as one of several search engines used for online information access, and Bing’s user population may not be fully representative of the United States population. Our study carefully controls for internet access, as measured by the census, during the analysis such that any observed effects cannot be explained by differences in population internet access. Our approach combines search log data with socioeconomic and environmental variables that are routinely captured through census tracks to examine the influence of such census variables on potentially a diverse array of different topic areas of digital engagement at population scales. Our observed changes can only be attributed to ZIP code levels and not individuals because individual-level SDoH factors are not available and to preserve anonymity. Like any retrospective observational study, the potential for unobserved or uncontrolled confounding prevents us from making causal claims. However, we adjusted for observed confounding through a matching-based and difference-in-difference based methodology (Methods). Our d...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2021.09.14.21263545v1 on medRxiv