پژوهشهای کاربردی روانشناختی (Aug 2024)
Investigating the Role of the Covid-19 Epidemic on Iranians’ Queries for Health Information on the Internet during Six Outbreaks of the Disease from February 2020 to April 2022
Abstract
The objective of this research was to investigate the information search behavior of Iranians on the Internet during the COVID-19 pandemic and to examine the relationship between the peak of the disease and the searches performed on the Internet. The purpose of this research was fundamental, and the research method was descriptive. The statistical population is the searches performed by Iranians from February 2020 to April 2022, and the investigated sample was the searched concepts related to anxiety and mental health. The first part of the data consisted of the queries that were extracted from the Google Trends website in December 2022. The second part, which consisted of the daily statistics of death and new infections, was obtained from the Johns Hopkins University website. Python version 3.12 was employed to conduct data analysis, which included the Granger causality test and Pearson correlation. The results indicate that the search for anxiety-related concepts has increased at the beginning of the epidemic. The quantity of searches for anxiety concepts at the beginning of the epidemic is positively and significantly correlated with the number of deaths caused by the disease. Consequently, the quantity of anxiety searches should increase over a period of a few days as the number of deaths increases. These searches diminished as the number of deaths decreased; however, the trend of anxiety searches ceased to be correlated with the number of deaths after a few months. The search for psychological treatment was modest at the onset of the epidemic; however, it increased after nine months, and the number of deaths also increased, prompting an increase in these searches. The results show that internet inquiries can be a useful tool for monitoring community concerns.
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