Making Sense of Health: Understanding COVID-19 Online Searches and News Coverage 
Yiwei Xu, University of Washington

This talk introduces two studies examining health communication and the information environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study 1 investigates collective information-seeking behaviors in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, using cross-sectional and time-series analyses to identify predictors of Google Trends and the topics that aroused the most interest. By using online observational big data, the study also advances existing information seeking theories, which have traditionally relied on lab experiments. Study 2 examines local TV news coverage of racial disparities in COVID-19. The first part of Study 2 uses content analysis to investigate how local TV news stories attributed causes and solutions for COVID-19-related racial health and social disparities. The second part of Study 2 uses supervised machine learning and linear mixed models to examine market-level social and demographic characteristics as predictors of local television news coverage of COVID-19-related racial disparities using the theoretical lens of agenda building and the community structure model. 

Yiwei Xu (PhD, Cornell) is a postdoctoral scholar at the UW Center for an Informed Public and Information School, and a Data Science postdoctoral fellow at the UW eScience Institute. Her scholarship examines and develops theory-driven communication strategies that address persistent and emergent public health challenges, including racial disparities, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and gun violence, with the goal of promoting evidence-based policies and health equity. She also researches collective-level phenomena in health communication. She conducts experiments, surveys, and content analysis by incorporating computational methods. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, including Health Communication, Political Communication, and International Journal of Communication. Yiwei’s dissertation was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and her work has received a top-paper award from the International Communication Association (ICA).