The Influence of Newspaper Readership and Social Media Use on Individuals’ Likelihood of Engagement in Health-Protective Behavior against COVID-19

The project aims to investigate information disseminated on mass media and social media as factors that may influence COVID-19 risk perceptions and the extent to which individuals adopt health-protective behaviors or behaviors that may put them at risk concerning COVID-19. The project has three main components: 1) Application of machine learning techniques for analysis of content about COVID-19 on social media (Twitter), 2) A content analysis of news about COVID-19 published by national newspapers, and 3) An online survey, along with modules containing survey-experiments. The research team for the project: Lemi Baruh (Department of Media and Visual Arts), Ali Çarkoğlu (Department of International Relations), Zeynep Cemalcılar (Department of Psychology), CSSH (Department of Psychology) alumnus Ozan Kuru (currently a postdoc researcher at the University of Pennsylvania) and GSSSH (International Relations and Political Science Doctoral Program) alumnus Kerem Yıldırım (currently a postdoc researcher at Duke University).