(Mal) adjustment to societal crisis: A case study from the analysis of coping expressions on social media

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Cláudia Mariana Dias
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/10096
• topic: Ebola; Coping; Media sociais -- Social media; Twitter; Societal crisis; Health epidemics; Estratégias de enfrentamento; Crise social -- Social crisis; Epidemias

The present research had the goal to explore how individuals perceived, reacted to and coped with the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014, which was considered to be a health epidemic. When confronted with public health events perceived as threats, people tend to adapt to them by individually and collectively make sense of them (e.g. concerning the source of contagion) and manage resources to best cope with the demands posed. One of the maladaptive side-effects of this sense making process occurs when individuals associate the epidemic and its related features to specific social groups, for example by blaming them for the outbreak and ultimately, stigmatizing. In the specific case of the Ebola epidemic, we aimed to comprehend whether it was 1) more associated to the African continent and its related social groups (Africans; African countries; …) than to other countries, as evidence of a Symbolic Othering effect; and 2) if there were natural manifestations of this othering, by means of coping with the perceived threat, in the form of escape and opposition coping strategies.. Hence, we aimed to demonstrate the Symbolic Othering effect by means of a web-based questionnaire in which participants estimated the percentage of cases of human contamination, in non-contaminated African and non-African countries. Secondly, we aimed to present evidence of naturally occurring instances of Symbolic Othering in the form of coping expressions collected on social media, namely Twitter. This multi-method approach allowed both a qualitative and quantitative analysis. Results showed a strong association between the Ebola epidemic and the African continent, with more human contamination cases identified in African countries, even though they had an actual zero percentage of cases. Moreover, the qualitative analysis of twitter data showed direct and indirect mentions to the social group – Africa/Africans/African countries – in addition to the identification of other groups to blame for the epidemic and its social amplification, such as the government, media and other targets. Overall, these results present themselves as a relevant for health crisis managers and communicators, given that Symbolic Othering effects may be found when people perceived health related events as threats, which may eventually lead into social stigmatization processes.