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Narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to COVID-19: A computational text analysis

Religious responses to COVID-19 as portrayed in a major news source raise the issue of conflict or cooperation between religious bodies and public health authorities. We compared articles in the New York Times relating to religion and COVID-19 with the COVID-19 statements posted on 63 faith-based or...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Idler, Ellen, Bernau, John A., Zaras, Dimitrios
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8812967/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35113914
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262905
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author Idler, Ellen
Bernau, John A.
Zaras, Dimitrios
author_facet Idler, Ellen
Bernau, John A.
Zaras, Dimitrios
author_sort Idler, Ellen
collection PubMed
description Religious responses to COVID-19 as portrayed in a major news source raise the issue of conflict or cooperation between religious bodies and public health authorities. We compared articles in the New York Times relating to religion and COVID-19 with the COVID-19 statements posted on 63 faith-based organizations’ web sites, and with the guidance documents published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) specifically for religious bodies. We used computational text analysis to identify and compare sentiments and topics in the three bodies of text. Sentiment analysis showed consistent positive values for faith-based organizations’ texts throughout the period. The initial negative sentiment of religion—COVID-19 coverage in the New York Times rose over the period and eventually converged with the consistently positive sentiment of faith-based documents. In our topic modelling analysis, rank order and regression analysis showed that topic prevalence was similar in the faith-based and public health sources, and both showed statistically significant differences from the New York Times. We conclude that there is evidence of both narratives and counter-narratives, and that these showed demonstrable shifts over time. Text analysis of public documents shows alignment of the interests of public health and religious bodies, which can be discerned for the benefit of communities if parties are trusted and religious messages are consistent with public health communications.
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spelling pubmed-88129672022-02-04 Narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to COVID-19: A computational text analysis Idler, Ellen Bernau, John A. Zaras, Dimitrios PLoS One Research Article Religious responses to COVID-19 as portrayed in a major news source raise the issue of conflict or cooperation between religious bodies and public health authorities. We compared articles in the New York Times relating to religion and COVID-19 with the COVID-19 statements posted on 63 faith-based organizations’ web sites, and with the guidance documents published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) specifically for religious bodies. We used computational text analysis to identify and compare sentiments and topics in the three bodies of text. Sentiment analysis showed consistent positive values for faith-based organizations’ texts throughout the period. The initial negative sentiment of religion—COVID-19 coverage in the New York Times rose over the period and eventually converged with the consistently positive sentiment of faith-based documents. In our topic modelling analysis, rank order and regression analysis showed that topic prevalence was similar in the faith-based and public health sources, and both showed statistically significant differences from the New York Times. We conclude that there is evidence of both narratives and counter-narratives, and that these showed demonstrable shifts over time. Text analysis of public documents shows alignment of the interests of public health and religious bodies, which can be discerned for the benefit of communities if parties are trusted and religious messages are consistent with public health communications. Public Library of Science 2022-02-03 /pmc/articles/PMC8812967/ /pubmed/35113914 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262905 Text en © 2022 Idler et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Idler, Ellen
Bernau, John A.
Zaras, Dimitrios
Narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to COVID-19: A computational text analysis
title Narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to COVID-19: A computational text analysis
title_full Narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to COVID-19: A computational text analysis
title_fullStr Narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to COVID-19: A computational text analysis
title_full_unstemmed Narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to COVID-19: A computational text analysis
title_short Narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to COVID-19: A computational text analysis
title_sort narratives and counter-narratives in religious responses to covid-19: a computational text analysis
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8812967/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35113914
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262905
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