Social Media Opinions on Working From Home in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Observational Study

BACKGROUND: Since March 2020, companies nationwide have started work from home (WFH) owing to the rapid increase of confirmed COVID-19 cases in an attempt to help prevent the disease from spreading and to rescue the economy from the pandemic. Many organizations have conducted surveys to understand people’s opinions toward WFH. However, the findings are limited owing to a small sample size and the dynamic topics over time. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to understand public opinions regarding WFH in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: We conducted a large-scale social media study using Twitter data to portray different groups of individuals who have positive or negative opinions on WFH. We performed an ordinary least squares regression analysis to investigate the relationship between the sentiment about WFH and user characteristics including gender, age, ethnicity, median household income, and population density. To better understand the public opinion, we used latent Dirichlet allocation to extract topics and investigate how tweet contents are related to people’s attitude. RESULTS: On performing ordinary least squares regression analysis using a large-scale data set of publicly available Twitter posts (n=28,579) regarding WFH during April 10-22, 2020, we found that the sentiment on WFH varies across user characteristics. In particular, women tend to be more positive about WFH (P<.001). People in their 40s are more positive toward WFH than those in other age groups (P<.001). People from high-income areas are more likely to have positive opinions about WFH (P<.001). These nuanced differences are supported by a more fine-grained topic analysis. At a higher level, we found that the most negative sentiment about WFH roughly corresponds to the discussion on government policy. However, people express a more positive sentiment when discussing topics on “remote work or study” and “encouragement.” Furthermore, topic distributions vary across different user groups. Women pay more attention to family activities than men (P<.05). Older people talk more about work and express a more positive sentiment regarding WFH. CONCLUSIONS: This paper presents a large-scale social media–based study to understand the public opinion on WFH in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope that this study can contribute to policymaking both at the national and institution or company levels to improve the overall population’s experience with WFH.