| Author: | Yao, Le |
| Title: | Telling the tale of health crisis response on social media : an exploration of narrative plot and commenters' co-narration |
| Advisors: | Li, Dechao (CBS) Ngai, Cindy (CBS) |
| Degree: | DALS |
| Year: | 2023 |
| Subject: | Communication in public health Social media Discourse analysis, Narrative Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Faculty of Humanities |
| Pages: | 223 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The centrality of narrative in how we learn and make sense of the world is well-documented in literature. In the health care dimension, narrative has also been widely researched as an important means to promote health and well-being. In this research project, we seek to explore the role of narrative in communicating public health crisis messages on the social media platform by focusing on narrative plot, a central facet of narrative which has not yet received adequate attention particularly in health crisis context. Moreover, as the collaborative affordance of social media encourages audience participation and publics’ voices are important in crisis communication, the study conceptualized a multivocal narration process of crisis narratives enacted on social media platforms. Thus, we also aim to investigate how social media users leverage commenting as a resource to participate in the co-narration of health crisis narratives. Potential associations between narrative plots and different forms of co-narration exhibited in the comments were also explored. For the purposes of this study, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has been selected as the public health crisis context under inquiry, in which we examined a major Chinese state-owned media outlet (i.e. People’s Daily) regarding its communication with social media users on Sina Weibo. To study the real-world data extracted from the social media site, the study relies on qualitative content analysis as the main method of analysis, complemented by thematic analysis and in-depth textual analysis. The study reported in the paper is composed of three main parts. The first part is primarily concerned with the investigation of narrative plots embedded in People’s Daily’s posts. Based on the context-specific features uncovered for health crisis narratives, we explored narrative plots in each narrative post through analyzing character’s goal-directed experience, which is underpinned by three core concepts including goal process, goal content, and goal struggle. Employing these three concepts as the analyzing dimensions, while also considering contextual events referred to in the posts, the research then identified 12 different types of narrative plot present in the dataset. These include Problem, Response, Dedication, Support, Memorial, Dedicated support, Success, Hard-won success, Successful help, Mistake, Empowerment, and Empowered support. To further enrich this account on narrative plot, an additional in-depth analysis of the data was carried out to examine the specific goals and struggle present in the data as well as the emotional valence that different narrative plots may carry. In the second part of the study, we switched the focus to Weibo users’ co-narration by looking into comments under People’s Daily’s narrative posts. Using a combination of concept-driven and data-driven approaches, we developed an analytical framework consisting of compliant and non-compliant telling based on commenters’ attitudes to the narrative originally posted by People’s Daily: compliant telling manifests in four different forms, including emoting, second-story telling, knowledge sharing, and appealing, while non-compliant telling contains interrupting and rejecting. Analysis based on this framework revealed that only 10.5% of all the comments we examined fell into the category of non-compliant telling, while 88.2% exhibited compliant co-narration in which emoting is the most common form. This indicates that the majority of Weibo users participated collaboratively in co-telling the narrative posted by People’s Daily, and they do so primarily through contributing an emotional component to the original narrative. In the third part of this study, we carried out statistical analysis based on the results generated from preceding analyses and uncovered some interesting associations between types of narrative plots and various forms of co-narration exhibited in the comments. Finally, this paper provides a discussion based on the main results in an effort to identify plausible explanations that account for the findings; we also draw on the theory of discourse of renewal to discuss how narrative and narrative plot may offer a promising site for enacting renewal discourse in public health emergency contexts. Through this analytic endeavor, the study intends to add to the literature on narrative in the health care dimension, particularly regarding public health crisis messaging on social media. It is hoped that this research can be of value in advancing understanding regarding narrative and social media co-narration in public health emergencies as well as providing practical implications for leveraging the power of narrative to enhance public understanding and foster empathy and collaboration in such contexts. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7164.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 1.86 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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