Abstract
This study was conducted to compare the trends of public perception in South Korea about the vaccine pass requiring the unvaccinated to eat alone during the COVID-19 crisis. Data were collected via Text mining; frequency, association, and sentiment analysis using the social big data analysis service, (known as “Some-Trend”), 2 months before and after December 16, 2021, when the vaccine pass was announced. The total number of search results was 4899 occurrences of the keywords using “eating alone” and “Hon-bab” (Korean abbreviation for eating alone). During the week of December 16, the frequency was the highest (770 occurrences). Compared to the weeks before the announcement sentiment analysis shows that words including “Reject,” “Discrimination,” and “Uncomfortable,” among others, either newly appeared or increased in frequency. And also, the percentage of positive words decreased from 54.5% to 34% and that of negative words increased from 30.2% to 43.3%. The introduction of the vaccine pass has raised negative public interest, particularly regarding the policy of unvaccinated people forcefully restricted to eat alone. Accordingly, this study showed that the vaccine policy had not gain positive perception of the public.
Previous studies have found that the frequency of eating alone has recently increased, and positive perceptions of eating alone have been reported.
Our results showed that the policy of the unvaccinated mandatorily eating alone during the COVID-19 pandemic did not gain positive public sympathy. Therefore, this study provides basic data to evaluate the usefulness of public response confirmation after policy establishment through social big data analysis.
This study revealed that understanding real-time big data can detect immediate changes in the public perception of newly established health policy. This is critical to evaluating the policy implications for future infectious diseases or new medical circumstances. It can be used as a basis for research to utilize big data.
Introduction
Since its emergence at the end of 2019, the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has changed the lives of people worldwide in many ways, concerning politics, economy, education, science, health, and culture. With the spread of the Omicron variant, the number of confirmed cases worldwide reached 480 030 544 and the number of confirmed deaths reached 6 151 645 as of April 11, 2022. 1 To prevent the spread of infection, each country has implemented quarantine measures, such as handwashing, wearing masks, and social distancing, 2 and vaccine pass.
The vaccine pass is an administrative arrangement that allows only those who have completed vaccination, with some exceptions, to use public facilities, for the protection of unvaccinated people. 3 The scope of application of the vaccine pass was public facilities with a high risk of infection transmission and facilities such as nursing homes or geriatric hospitals with high-risk groups. 3 The Korean government announced the pass on December 16, 2021, and implemented it from January 3, 2022. 3 Vaccinated persons were free to use restaurants and cafes as before, but those who were not vaccinated had to eat alone involuntarily. Overseas, the European Union introduced the EU Digital COVID Certificate and the Super Green Pass, which recognizes only those who have been vaccinated, tested negative, and cured within 6 months of being infected. 4 In the US, in November 2021, the government made it compulsory for staff in private businesses to undergo vaccination and wear a mask if not vaccinated. Companies not following this rule were fined. 5 Although the vaccine pass is a policy to prevent an overload of the medical system, support daily recovery, and protect against the risk of COVID-19 infection, the view exists that it excessively limits the basic rights of unvaccinated people. 6 In this context, on March 1, 2022, the Korean government temporarily suspended the vaccine pass. 3 On January 13, 2022, the US Supreme Court ruled that the imposition of fines against companies for not wearing masks was an excessive exercise of power and invalidated it. 5 Vaccine passes have been tried worldwide. Conflicting opinions support the vaccine pass because it is possible to continue daily life with protection from the risk of infection and appeal to stop vaccination due to dissatisfaction with the restriction of individual freedom.
Such quarantine and restriction measures have had a great impact on the lives of individuals. In particular, the social distancing policy restricted private gatherings and outings and had negative effects on mental health, such as depression and anxiety. 7 It also caused many changes in daily life, such as outdoor activities, travel, and eating habits. 8 Changes in eating behaviors had a close and immediate impact on the lives of the public. Eating is not only a physical function but also a social activity. Empirical research has shown that sharing meals with others promotes community solidarity and sociability and builds organizational relationships.9,10 In this respect, eating alone leads to feelings of unhappiness, 11 less pleasure, 12 and loneliness. 10 Previous studies have focused on the negative social problems caused by eating alone. 13 The frequency of eating alone has grown for reasons such as changes in family structure, an increase in single-person households, and busy work schedules. 14 When eating alone, individuals preferred eating out to avoid shopping for food or spending time preparing meals at home. 15 Recently, a variety of content can be viewed using mobile devices, which can compensate for negative emotions such as loneliness due to the absence of others when eating alone.14,15 A positive perception of eating alone is emerging: the advantages of menu selection, freedom of mealtime, and enjoyment of comfortable meals have been reported. 16 Involuntary experiences of eating alone have also increased because this has become rule of the vaccine pass, a policy to avoid the risk of infection during the coronavirus pandemic. 17
Recently, as the role of the Internet and smartphones in daily life has increased, the public has increased access to social media. In addition, the public uses social network services to easily share and communicate their thoughts and daily lives with others online. 18 With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has emerged as a critical communication tool for generating, disseminating, and consuming information. 19 Social media allows you to learn how the general public reacts to government risk communication messages and epidemic control measures. 20 Therefore, social media-based data analysis is an appropriate method to understand public perception in the COVID-19 era. 21 In other words, big data analysis that examines people’s perceptions in communities, blogs, cafes, and news can extract the perceptions existing in society, without researcher design. This approach has the advantage of the researcher being able to interpret public perception by handling and extracting meaningful information from vast big data. 22 Thus, analyzing big data using communities, blogs, cafes, and news is useful to understand the changed perceptions of eating alone, as well as the needs of the public, in real time, in light of the vaccine pass.
It is important to examine how the perceptions of eating alone have changed given the vaccine pass and understand what these changes mean. Restricting people’s daily activities has been suggested as not the optimal approach when helping to slow or stop the spread of infectious diseases. 23 Therefore, evaluating public response confirmation after policy establishment through social big data analysis is necessary. In this study, we collect documents through social media related to eating alone in Korea. Through keyword-related word-frequency analysis, word-association analysis, and sentiment analysis, we aim to examine public responses about policy and related issues. In addition, we intend to create greater awareness among health policymakers about daily life restrictions resulting from the vaccine pass. The results of this study can be used as basic data for the government to develop more accurate public health promotion strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods
Study Design
This study is a social media data analysis using keywords extracted from social network services through the big data analysis website to investigate the trend of public perceptions on the policy that restricts the unvaccinated from eating out alone strengthened social distancing between 2 points for comparing before and after the announcement: from October 17 to December 16, 2021, and December 17, 2021, to February 16, 2022. This research aims to explore these research questions by an updated method of analyzing the keywords from social network services: what keywords were frequently mentioned before and after the policy? what keywords were mainly associated before and after the policy? what positive and negative keywords were mentioned before and after the policy?
Keywords
The search keywords were “Hon-bab,” which is a textism abbreviated from “eating alone” in Korean, along with its English counterpart “eating alone.” We defined “eating alone” as only oneself eating outside, without any restrictions. “Corona,” which is abbreviated for COVID-19 in Korea, “infection,” and “prevention” were set as additional words to extract documents that mention the COVID-19 situation. “Advertising,” “recommendation,” “publicity,” or “product” were used as exclusive words to extract documents only about personal daily interests or thoughts, not about those for publicizing specific products or places.
Data Source
Data collection was conducted using “Some-Trend” from the VAIV Company Inc., a private social big data analysis company that allows researchers to gain the results of the dataset by purchasing access permission. The service automatically sorted the relevant documents from social network services including Twitter, Instagram, and documents on various platforms such as Internet communities, news, blogs, etc. through Big Index Technology (BIT), developed based on the Hadoop big data framework. From those documents, data on the frequency, association words, and sentiment words are extracted in real time by selecting the options that the researcher needs. Through this service, syntax structure analysis, minimizing loss of meaning of data by extracting keywords, key phrases, and key facts to understand the meaning and function of Korean vocabulary, was applied, along with sentiment analysis by attributes, conducted through natural language processing (NLP) and provided in an Excel sheet. In particular, the service provides every opportunity to effectively understand the changes in the frequency of keywords over time through each visual repository. All channels were selected for data collection in this study, and retweets were excluded to remove duplicate content.
Text Mining
Text mining is an analysis process to extract useful information from electronic documents, applying frequency analysis, association analysis, and sentiment analysis. This study data from text mining changes every time because it randomly selected the pages from social network services via the software in Some-Trend website(https://some.co.kr/). After both researchers repeatedly performed the process, we made a consensus to choose the final results on February 24, 2022.
First, frequency analysis was used to extract entity names, nouns, and words predicated as keywords from unstructured documents using NLP. The cumulative distribution by period and time points in which the keywords of the study, “Hon-bab” and “eating alone,” were most frequently mentioned were established. And also, weekly trends were applied to compare the ranking of the words’ trends week to week during the period.
Second, association analysis analyzed the co-occurrence relationship with the keywords and derived frequently mentioned words as association words within a certain range, and established and ranked the trends according to the frequency occurrence at each point in time. For the purpose of analysis, some of the unrelated search categories (eg, brand/product, natural environment etc.) were excluded.
Third, the sentiment analysis used the sentiment dictionary developed by VAIV company to distinguish positive, negative, and neutral words for the usage of the keywords. The full text in the original documents was double-checked to understand the meaning of each association word and its positive or negative implications.
Results
Frequency of Keywords
The frequency of keyword-related searches for 4 months before and after and including December 16, 2021, the release date of the COVID-19 vaccine pass, is as follows (Table 1). From October 16, 2021 to February 15, 2022, the total number of keyword-related searches was 4899. The week including December 16, the date of the announcement of the vaccine pass, had the highest number, 770, following which the frequency of keyword-related searches was more than 300 until the first week of January, indicating a high interest in the issue. According to the results of search frequency by channel, the channel with the highest frequency in December was the blog (1039 occurrences), followed by community, news, Instagram, and Twitter (Figure 1).
Associated Word Ranking Related to Keywords Before and After COVID-19 Vaccine Pass.
Weekly Frequency chart of Hon-bab (eating alone) by social media channels.
Association Analysis
The ranking results related to keywords before and after the announcement of the COVID-19 vaccine pass are as follows (Table 1, Figure 2). According to the top 10 words before and after the vaccine pass, the words with high frequency before the vaccine pass were common words such as “famous restaurant,” “lunch,” “meal,” “home,” “menu,” and “dinner.” The words that showed high frequency after the quarantine pass were words related to the COVID-19 vaccine pass, such as “corona,” “unvaccinated,” “vaccine,” “quarantine,” “vaccination,” and “vaccine pass.” Among the top 10 words, words such as “famous restaurant,” “meal,” “restaurant,” “café,” “vaccine,” and “unvaccinated” were commonly included in the top 10 before and after the vaccine pass announcement, but after the announcement, the frequency of the searches increased significantly. Among them, “vaccine” increased from 164 to 676 occurrences, and “unvaccinated” from 154 to 750 occurrences, 410% and 480%, respectively. According to the words from 11th to 20th, words such as “daily life,” “alone,” “friend,” and “food” showed high ranking before the vaccine pass. After the vaccine pass, words such as “gathering,” “government,” “take-out,” and “non-infected” newly appeared or increased in frequency.
Comparison of association words before and after the COVID-19 vaccine pass policy.
Sentiment Analysis
The results of the sentiment analysis of positive and negative words related to the keywords before and after the COVID-19 vaccine pass are as follows (Table 2, Figure 3). The words that appeared in the top 10 were words such as “possible,” “good,” “enjoy,” and “do well”; these words appeared in common before and after the vaccine pass. As a result of checking the original text, most of the contents were “a restaurant where you can eat alone” and “enjoy/good/do well eating alone.” This is likely a result of showing neutral or positive awareness about eating alone itself. The words that appeared or increased in frequency after the vaccine pass were “reject,” “reinforce,” “discrimination,” “limit,” “dissatisfaction,” and “side effect”—words related to the experience of using a restaurant or café after the vaccine pass. As the appearance of negative words was higher than that of positive words, it can be seen that the awareness of discomfort and dissatisfaction after the vaccine pass had increased.
Sentiment Word Ranking Related to Keywords Before and After COVID-19 Vaccine Pass.
Comparison of sentimental words before and after the COVID-19 vaccine pass policy.
From 11th to 20th position, words such as “eat well,” “lonely,” “feel lacking,” and “kind” appeared before the vaccine pass. Checking the original text related to the word, there was in many, the feeling of eating alone, evaluations of the restaurant, and the staff, such as “I eat well alone,” “I am lonely/sorry because I am eating alone,” and “The staff is friendly.” After the vaccine pass, words such as “delivery is possible,” “backlash,” “controversy,” “damage,” “uncomfortable” appeared. In other words, these were words related to the inconvenience of using a restaurant or café, the perception of backlash and damage, and ordering food delivered to avoid discomfort due to the vaccine pass.
From 21st to 30th position, before the vaccine pass, words such as “annoying,” “awkward,” “cheer up,” and “not bad” appeared. These are words that express how people feel while eating alone. After the vaccine pass, words such as “difficult,” “kicked out,” and “problematic” appeared. Through the original data, it can be seen that the experience of being kicked out of a restaurant that prohibited eating alone after the vaccine pass or raised a problem in this situation, made eating alone more difficult than before the vaccine pass. As for the percentages of keyword-related positive and negative words, positive words were 54.5% and negative words 30.2% before the vaccine pass, whereas after the pass, the positive words decreased to 34%, and the negative ones increased significantly to 43.3%.
Discussion
This study was conducted to compare the public perception patterns of Hon-bab, a textism implying eating alone, before and after the execution of the intensive COVID-19 quarantine policy, prohibiting the unvaccinated from eating outside. We now discuss several points of view and studies on the further establishment of healthcare policy, which can affect daily life, and public interest in government infection prevention policy.
In the frequency analysis, our data showed that Koreans commented on the impact of vaccine pass on their daily life and COVID-19 infection rates. Meanwhile, the vaccine pass had already been applied and stimulated controversy in many European countries for its lack of equity in COVID-19 prevention. The Korean government additionally implemented stricter restrictions on the unvaccinated eating outside with others. 24 In January 2022, the government eventually eased the vaccine pass policy for the unvaccinated. Notwithstanding this, the frequency of mentions of eating alone remained high. This showed that the policy might affect the public perception of eating alone as a means to prevent COVID-19 infection. 25
Previous research has revealed that the era of COVID-19 has changed various aspects of our lifestyles, particularly eating habits and food consumption. 26 Quarantine policies in many forms, such as “stay-at-home,” “lockdown,” and “social distancing,” have increased the proportion of people who chose to eat alone. This was considered important for the prevention of public infection by minimizing contact with others. 27 However, it could also negatively affect individuals’ physical and mental health in the form of malnutrition, depression, and so on. 28 Therefore, it is important to consider the implications of the keywords from social media which would not only show the trend of public perception but also forecast the positive or negative phenomenon after the health policy implication.
When the pass was announced, on January 16, 2021, the number of confirmed and severe cases was increasing rapidly in South Korea, even at a high vaccination rate of 84.1% or more (based on primary inoculation data). The emergency risk of COVID-19 was evaluated as “very high.” 24 The threat of Omicron, the mutant virus, had spread across the country, and the restrictions on eating out for the unvaccinated had been further strengthened amid fears of breakthrough infection, adding to public confusion. The results in this study support the phenomenon that words related to eating alone with COVID-19 existed in both compared periods, but after the government announcement, posts containing associated words such as “coronavirus,” “unvaccinated,” “vaccine,” “quarantine,” “inoculation,” and “vaccine pass” increased significantly. This trend indicated the public reaction to the quarantine policy in the form of helpful information and self-expression on social media in the COVID-19 era. 19
Following the results of frequency analysis, it could be possible to assume which part the public reacts the first through social media. In the words emerging after the pass was announced, a few posts provided measures necessary to comply with the government policy including “Take-out,” “personnel,” and “COVID-19 testing certificate.” The content of these posts was mostly mentions of how the policy affected public trust in the government and self-efficacy about how to overcome this strong restriction during this crisis (eg, the creation of lists of restaurants that allowed the entry of the unvaccinated). 2
The posts also included debates about the social stigma around vaccination, for which social media has become an important means of leading people to perceive and carry out healthy behavior. 29 On the other hand, per their individual situations, a problem has emerged particularly concerning discrimination between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Even though being vaccinated is a personal choice depending on people’s beliefs about the predictability of health outcomes, some believed that it restricted the unvaccinated unfairly, while others thought it was mandatory to protect people vulnerable to infection. Our study found that in social media posts, the implications of the associated words in this regard could vary greatly.
Experiencing 2 years of COVID-19, recent studies have presented the social outcomes and impact of healthcare policies during this crisis. 30 Couching our study with these studies on the trends of public perceptions due to policy announcements was an interesting and fruitful endeavor. The trust in the government’s response to infection prevention impacts people and affects indirectly their health behavior 31 and directly the motivation to take any action to comply with restrictions such as social distancing. 32
From the sentiment analysis results, the most frequent word was “possible,” which also existed before the policy’s execution in daily usage to look for a place to eat alone. However, it was more frequently used subsequently, with more posts criticizing the government policy and the perceived discrimination against the unvaccinated. Interestingly, in South Korea, some posts used social media to inform some restaurants that rejected the unvaccinated and others that let them come to oppose this policy. As negative words such as “reject,” “discrimination,” and “dissatisfaction” increased due to the government’s ambiguous response and the public’s misunderstanding that the unvaccinated transmit the virus, even though the government explained the intention of the policy, it was thought to be insufficiently persuasive to resolve the conflict. 29
This study’s results show that some people had faith that the government’s quarantine policy to protect people from infection, whereas others considered it as an undue restriction to their daily life, causing social chaos and resistance. These differences in perception were because of differences in subjective understanding of the situation and policies, depending on factors such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, 33 or cultural differences. 34 Thus, a process of persuading the public with sufficient information in implementing health policy, along with concrete prior measures, must be in place for people who are undergoing strong restrictions.
Throughout the 2-year COVID-19 crisis, the Korean people were evaluated for observing the so-called “K-Quarantine” by following rules such as handwashing, mask-wearing, and the government’s systematic quarantine measures of lockdown and social distancing. 35 Social media research has the advantage of immediate confirmation of public opinion on social changes, revealing an individual’s thoughts, sympathy, and persuasiveness. 36 In this study period, in particular, the emergence of new, unpredictable infection patterns and inconsistent government health policies made people more anxious and weakened their will to take healthy action. In response to the continuously changing circumstances, this research method was the most appropriate because of instant big data analysis to collect public opinion to ensure more convincing and effective health policies in the future.
Limitation
A major limitation of this study was that keyword trends were analyzed by focusing on the number of occurrences among the texts extracted from the social network services, so polysemous words were not identified case by case. Moreover, due to the nature of the Korean language, some words and their rankings were vaguely listed. For example, different terms with similar meanings were not unified since the results were analyzed according to the dictionary. In addition, the extracted posts were inconsistent; even if the researcher set the same keywords and period, the trends were somewhat different in each search due to its random algorithm. Despite the limitations of this study, due to the lack of previous research comparing the immediate perception of the public toward this COVID-19 quarantine policy before and after its execution, this study provides meaningful results that confirm how this policy impacted people’s perceptions of daily life, particularly about eating alone.
Conclusion
This study was conducted to understand the change in Korean public perception of eating alone before and after the announcement of strengthening of COVID-19 quarantine rules, through social media big data analysis. Given 2 points in time, before and after the introduction of the policy, the number of mentions of the unvaccinated eating alone increased after the announcement of the pass, increasing public interest; however, it was confirmed by the changes in the negative associated words and sentiment words that the policy did not gain public sympathy. This study advances our understanding of the usage of real-time big data and methods for identifying immediate changes in public perception and how the public copes with the policy. Further studies and policy development can be expected to utilize these study results and respond to future infectious diseases or new healthcare implications.
Footnotes
Author Contribution
Y. H. Son & S. O. Jung conceptualized and developed the research, S. O. Jung performed analyzing the data and wrote the introduction and results, Y. H. Son contributed to methods and discussion sections and performed visualization.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This manuscript has been supported by Ewha Graduate Research Fellowship 2021.
Ethic and Consent
Our study did not require an ethical board approval or participants’ consent because this study did not have participants but used open-access data by social network service data crawling.
Ethical Consideration
Not applicable.
