Analysis of Family-Health-Related Topics on Wikipedia Yanyan Wang University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations August 2018 Analysis of Family-Health-Related Topics on Wikipedia Yanyan Wang University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Library and Information Science Commons, and the Medicine and Health Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Wang, Yanyan, "Analysis of Family-Health-Related Topics on Wikipedia" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 1945. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1945 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ANALYSIS OF FAMILY-HEALTH-RELATED TOPICS ON WIKIPEDIA by Yanyan Wang A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee August 2018 ABSTRACT ANALYSIS OF FAMILY-HEALTH-RELATED TOPICS ON WIKIPEDIA by Yanyan Wang The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2018 Under the Supervision of Professor Jin Zhang New concepts, terms, and topics always emerge; and meanings of existing terms and topics keep changing all the time. These phenomena occur more frequently on social media than on conventional media because social media allows a huge number of users to generate information online. Retrieving relevant results in different time periods of a fast-changing topic becomes one of the most difficult challenges in the information retrieval field. Among numerous topics discussed on social media, health-related topics are a major category which attracts increasing attention from the general public. This study investigated and explored the evolution patterns of family-health-related topics on Wikipedia. Three family-health-related topics (Child Maltreatment, Family Planning, and Women’s Health) were selected from the World Health Organization Website and their associated entries were retrieved on Wikipedia. Historical numeric and text data of the entries from 2010 to 2017 were collected from a Wikipedia data dump and the Wikipedia Web pages. Four periods were defined: 2010 to 2011, 2012 to 2013, 2014 to 2015, and 2016 to 2017. Coding, subject analysis, descriptive statistical analysis, inferential statistical analysis, SOM ii approach, and n-gram approach were employed to explore the internal characteristics and external popularity evolutions of the topics. The findings illustrate that the external popularities of the family-health-related topics declined from 2010 to 2017, although their content on Wikipedia kept increasing. The emerged entries had three features: specialization, summarization, and internationalization. The subjects derived from the entries became increasingly diverse during the investigated periods. Meanwhile, the developing trajectories of the subjects varied from one to another. According to the developing trajectories, the subjects were grouped into three categories: growing subject, diminishing subject, and fluctuating subject. The popularities of the topics among the Wikipedia viewers were consistent, while among the editors were not. For each topic, its popularity trend among the editors and the viewers was inconsistent. Child Maltreatment was the most popular among the three topics, Women’s Health was the second most popular, while Family Planning was the least popular among the three. The implications of this study include: (1) helping health professionals and general users get a more comprehensive understanding of the investigated topics; (2) contributing to the developments of health ontologies and consumer health vocabularies; (3) assisting Website designers in organizing online health information and helping them identify popular family- health-related topics; (4) providing a new approach for query recommendation in information retrieval systems; (5) supporting temporal information retrieval by presenting the temporal changes of family-health-related topics; and (6) providing a new combination of data collection and analysis methods for researchers. iii © Copyright by Yanyan Wang, 2018 All Rights Reserved iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ..........................................................................................................................................viii LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................................................................................. x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................xii 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Background & Rationale ................................................................................................................ 1 1.2. Research Problem, Questions and Hypotheses ............................................................................. 4 1.2.1. Research Problem Statement ........................................................................................... 4 1.2.2. Research Question One ..................................................................................................... 5 1.2.3. Research Question Two ..................................................................................................... 6 1.2.4. Research Question Three .................................................................................................. 9 1.3. Research Design ........................................................................................................................... 11 1.4. Definitions of Terms .................................................................................................................... 12 1.5. Chapter One Summary ................................................................................................................ 15 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................................................... 16 2.1. Temporal Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 17 2.1.1. Temporal Analysis ........................................................................................................... 18 2.1.2. Temporal Analysis Applied to Information Retrieval ...................................................... 20 2.1.3. Temporal Analysis Applied to Data Mining ..................................................................... 28 2.2. Social Media Studies .................................................................................................................... 34 2.2.1. Social Media .................................................................................................................... 35 2.2.2. Data Collection on Social Media Studies ......................................................................... 38 2.2.3. Data Mining Applied to Social Media Studies ................................................................. 43 2.2.4. Coding Methods Applied to Social Media Studies .......................................................... 48 2.3. Health Information Studies.......................................................................................................... 49 2.3.1. Consumer Health Information ........................................................................................ 49 2.3.2. Health Information on Social Media ............................................................................... 50 2.3.3. Family Health Studies ...................................................................................................... 52 2.4. SOM Studies ................................................................................................................................. 56 2.4.1. SOM History, Theories, and Algorithms .......................................................................... 56 2.4.2. Applications of SOM ........................................................................................................ 58 2.5. Chapter Two Summary ................................................................................................................ 60 3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................................ 62 3.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 62 3.2. Assumptions ................................................................................................................................ 64 3.3. Data Collection............................................................................................................................. 66 3.3.1. Selection of a Social Media Platform .............................................................................. 66 3.3.2. Selection of Topics .......................................................................................................... 68 3.3.3. Selection of Entries ......................................................................................................... 70 3.3.4. Selection of Time Periods...............................................................................................