Written by Michael LaPick
Healthcare Writer
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Monitoring Sentiment Around Healthcare Reform
What is the public saying about the 2014 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare?
This tracker searches Twitter’s API once daily for 100 unique tweets matching the terms “Affordable Care Act” and “Obamacare.” Their sentiment value is then analyzed with VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning), a tool designed for social media sentiment analysis.
The tracker is an exploratory tool for assessing the range of public sentiment around the ACA on any given day, and over time. A given tweet’s positive or negative sentiment score does not necessarily correlate with that tweet’s stance for or against the ACA.
The top chart shows tweets according to their compound sentiment score, VADER’s most useful single measure of sentiment for a given sentence, and averages them daily. The bottom chart shows the average sentiment score over time, beginning May 27, 2021.
Source: Hutto, C.J. & Gilbert, E.E. (2014). VADER: A Parsimonious Rule-based Model for Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Text. Eighth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-14). Ann Arbor, MI, June 2014.
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