The article deals with web-communications of doctors, medical students, and medical volunteers at the most popular groups of social media VKontakte. The empirical base of the study was the specialized communities: "Overheard by medics", "I am a medical student", "Medical volunteers. Moscow" and "United Medicine". The goal was to identify the topics and tensions of medical forums in the post-pandemic environment and the danger of a new pandemic. The topics of medical forum messages were detailed and structured in two stages. At the first stage, using automated probabilistic topic modeling, medical communication topics were identified (symptoms and treatment; education and employment; volunteering; jokes). At the second stage, in the identified topics, with the help of sociological expert analysis, key lexemes of action (“learn”, “treat”, “save”), identity (“I am a doctor”, “I am a volunteer”), as well as emotionality in the meaning of “good” (“excellent”, “effective”) and in the sense of “bad” (“complaint”, “threat”). Conclusions were drawn: 1) the Covid-19 pandemic has strengthened digital contacts in the medical environment and currently the development of online medical communications has the prospect of reaching a mass addressee; 2) the consequences of Covid-19 and new biothreats are increasing communication tensions in the medical community; 4) currently, medical web communications on VKontakte are a professional channel not intended for a mass audience; 5) medical volunteering, which developed during the pandemic, remains active and is in high demand; 6) analysis of medical web communications can be an additional source of knowledge about the situation in different areas of healthcare “here and now.”
Translated title of the contributionВрачи о КОВИД-19, о нас и о них: онлайн-коммуникация медицинских сообществ в ВКонтакте
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationсборник III Международной научно-практической конференции «COVID-19: Экономические и социальные импликации эволюции вируса» (RTCOV 2023)
PublisherSciTePress
StateAccepted/In press - 2024

    Scopus subject areas

  • Social Sciences(all)
  • Psychology(all)

    Research areas

  • COVID, medical forums, topicc modeling, social media, medical volunteers

ID: 116233883