Public opinion about the UK government during COVID-19 and implications for public health: A topic modeling analysis of open-ended survey response data
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Abstract
Confidence in the central UK Government has declined since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and while this may be linked to specific government actions to curb the spread of the virus, understanding is still incomplete. Examining public opinion is important, as research suggests that low confidence in government increases the extent of non-compliance with infection-dampening rules (for instance, social distancing); however, the detailed reasons for this association are still unclear.
Methods
To understand public opinion on the central UK government during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we used structural topic modeling, a text mining technique, to extract themes from over 4000 free-text survey responses, collected between 14 October and 26 November 2020.
Results
We identified eleven topics, among which were topics related to perceived government corruption and cronyism, complaints about inconsistency in rules and messaging, lack of clear planning, and lack of openness and transparency. Participants reported that elements of the government’s approach had made it difficult to comply with guidelines (e.g., changing rules) or were having impacts on mental wellbeing (e.g., inability to plan for the future).
Conclusions
Results suggested that consistent, transparent communication and messaging from the government is critical to improving compliance with measures to contain the virus, as well as protecting mental health during health emergencies.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.24.21254094: (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
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study had a number of limitations. First, we did not use data from a representative sample of the UK population and individuals who chose to respond and who spoke about the Government were a further sub-sample. However, the sample was heterogeneous and all participants were given the option to provide free text responses. The questions asked did not directly refer to opinions on the government, which would have had the limitation …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.24.21254094: (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
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study had a number of limitations. First, we did not use data from a representative sample of the UK population and individuals who chose to respond and who spoke about the Government were a further sub-sample. However, the sample was heterogeneous and all participants were given the option to provide free text responses. The questions asked did not directly refer to opinions on the government, which would have had the limitation of potentially prompting participants to take particular sides, so the opinions that were given were salient and held strongly enough that they were offered without direct prompt. Further, our focus was not on polling all opinions on the government but rather on understanding patterns and consequences of concerns about the government’s handling of the pandemic. It is also notable that the sample who responded was not dominated by those who were unemployed or from minority groups most adversely affected by the pandemic, whose experiences may be expected to have been the worst. Second, we identified government-related responses with government keywords but in some cases, these keywords were homonyms not necessarily used in a government-related context – for instance, “labour” was sometimes used to refer to childbirth instead of the political party. Further, as responses were not constricted to be about the government, some text was unrelated but was still included in the analysis, leading to topics that were not always fully homogeneous, so associ...
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.
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