While much has been made about the crucial role “key workers”, such as those working in public transportation, food services, and of course, medical workers, during the pandemic, there is a fear that this support is largely skin deep and fails to adequately support the buffering their mental and physical health has taken during the pandemic.

New research from Penn State attempts to use social media to understand how those key workers actually felt.  The analysis is interesting because while they tended to tweet less frequently than the average user, they more often spoke about mental health, both their own and others.

What’s more, while tweets were generally less positive during the pandemic, surprisingly, those made by key workers were more positive than average, despite the tremendous strain they were under.

Staying positive

“You would think that people who are essential workers with a very stressful work-life balance and have a lot of things going on would have more negative things to say,” the researchers say. “But they actually had a higher sentiment score than average Twitter users, and that’s interesting.”

The sentiment score on Twitter is calculated using the feeling or tone of a piece of text, with the score ranging from positive to negative.  It’s constructed using algorithms that estimate the sentiment of the text according to the occurrences of positive and negative words in the text.

In total, the researchers analyzed over 4,000 Twitter accounts from Jan 1st 2019 to Sep 30th 2020.  The analysis revealed that tweets made by key workers were consistently higher in sentiment than those from the general public, both before the pandemic and during it.  The researchers propose a couple of explanations for this.

“[Hypothetically], the people who are drawn to essential work, like doctors and nurses, may receive a stronger sense of purpose from their jobs or share characteristics that make them more positive people, and they may then project that online,” they suggest. “Or, it could be the case that some of these jobs cause them to have a public Twitter account, where they’re maybe less inclined to post negative things if there could be job-related consequences.”

It’s something the team plan to explore in more depth via interviews with key workers as they accept that the initial findings fail to portray the full story behind their findings.  It does nonetheless provide some interesting direction for future research, however.

“If you take a look at COVID-related mental health issues, we need to acknowledge that the essential workers are probably going through the most difficult situations right now,” they conclude. “We wanted to focus on this niche population who are at the forefront of much of the struggles during COVID-19, and then see what potential issues they’re facing and how we can better support them in terms of their mental health and stress.”