Research on the factors that shape public opinion have shown that individuals seek information about issues that are salient for them, and found strong associations between trends in issue awareness measured through survey and internet search volumes. Search term frequency can then be considered as a proxy measurement of how a population is aware of an issue. This predictive power has already been established in a range of behaviours: from the prediction of mortgage defaults and car sales to unemployment claims and tourist visits. The role of information-seeking in motivating search-engine queries also carries significant implications for the potential to represent Subjective Well-being. For instance, geographical differences in Google query for affect-laden terms (such as “anxiety”, “fear”, etc…), across US-counties, were strongly associated with variations in aggregate measures of physical and mental health (e.g., depression rate, cardiovascular morbidity).
However, if this captures spatial (geographical) variability, it does not relate to changes occurring in time, or more important for us, changes taking place in the prodromes or the aftermaths of significant events, shocks, news.
Currently, we are monitoring web-searches during the COVID-19 pandemic and found a strong association between Life Satisfaction, as measured by the British Office of National Statistics Population survey and Opinions Lifestyle Survey and Google trends in searches for affect-laden keywords, such as those associated with the word "anxiety" (R = -.75, p < .015 ; bootstrap 95% CI [-1.57, -.39], see Fig. 1).
Figure 1: Google's “anxiety” search volume is strongly associated with the ONS Life Satisfaction Survey before and during the COVID-19 epidemic in the United Kingdom. Higher Google Search volumes predict lower Life Satisfaction across different periods (for details as to when the survey data were collected or the search volumes have been averaged, see Fig. 2 legend).
Figure 2: Evolution of the Google's “anxiety” search volume and the ONS Life Satisfaction Survey before and during the COVID-19 epidemic in the United Kingdom. Note the variable sampling across the period (Quarterly sampling in 2019, Monthly sampling in Jan & Feb 2020 and weekly sampling 20 Mar -10 May 2020.
Source: 1- Google Inc. Mined and processed at Swansea University
2- Office for National Statistics - Annual Population Survey and Opinions Lifestyle Survey
Interestingly, the general methodology of this research is derived from our past work on the brain chemistry of motor behavior or the neuropsychiatry of impulsivity
The data combination pipeline is explained in fig 3.
The present research is a good example of the explanatory power of digital epidemiology, that is understanding disease using data (here, web-searches) that were not generated with that primary purpose.
Comentarios