Identifying the Characteristics of Palliative Care Information on Social Media Using a Qualitative and Sentiment Analysis Approach

Abstract

Background

Social media provides a novel data source for understanding palliative care from the perspectives of patients and their family caregivers. Nonetheless, no study has examined palliative care–related information on Japanese social media. This study aimed to identify the characteristics of palliative care information on Japanese social media.

Methods

Posts published on X (formerly Twitter) during the first week of each month from January to June 2024 that included 1 or more of the following terms were manually collected: “palliative care,” “end-of-life care,” or “palliative medicine.” Posts were analyzed inductively. A Japanese sentiment analysis model was applied to assign a sentiment score (0-1) to each post, with higher scores indicating more positive sentiment. The top 50 posts with the highest sentiment scores and the bottom 50 posts were further analyzed using the same qualitative approach.

Results

In total, 4689 posts were collected; of these, 3806 (81.2%) were related to palliative care. Thirteen categories were identified. The most frequent category was “general explanations about palliative care” (n = 1,280, 27.3%), followed by “sharing information about palliative care services” (n = 757, 16.1%). Posts with the lowest sentiment scores included “opinions or demands toward end-of-life care systems,” “opinions or demands towards medical practice and dissemination of palliative care,” and “reporting experiences of patients and informal caregivers.”

Conclusion

Japanese social media platforms may provide valuable insights into family caregivers’ experiences, potentially representing a resource for assessing the palliative care quality. Future studies should evaluate the validity of palliative care-related information on social media.