Exploring the heated debate over reopening for economy or continuing lockdown for public health safety concerns about COVID-19 in Twitter
by Sina Shokoohyar; Hossein Rikhtehgar Berenji; Julianne Dang
International Journal of Business and Systems Research (IJBSR), Vol. 15, No. 5, 2021

Abstract: This paper explores US residents' opinion regarding whether to reopen for the economy or to continue lockdown for public health safety concerns, by analysing 1.3 million unique COVID-19-related tweets that are collected from March 11, 2020, through June 8, 2020. Tweets are classified into three classes: 1) in favour of reopening the USA for the economy; 2) in favour of continuing lockdown for public health safety concerns; 3) neutral tweets (providing facts rather than opinions). Gradient boosting classifier algorithm with the accuracy of 88% outperformed other classifiers, (i.e., logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, neutral network and multinomial naïve Bayes) used in this study. The result shows that US residents are becoming more concerned about the economic impacts of the lockdowns, and they are more in favour of reopening the economy as time passes. Managerial implications and directions for future research are discussed based on the state-by-state details of US residents' opinions and their trends over time.

Online publication date: Tue, 31-Aug-2021

The full text of this article is only available to individual subscribers or to users at subscribing institutions.

 
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.

Pay per view:
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.

Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Business and Systems Research (IJBSR):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:

Username:        Password:          Forgotten your password?

Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.

If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com