Purpose – Social media has become an important part of daily interpersonal communication in contemporary society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes of UK consumers by identifying the hidden information in tweets, and provide a framework which can assist industry practitioners in managing social media data. Design/methodology/approach – Using a large-scale dataset of tweets relating to the Horsemeat scandal of 2013, a comprehensive data analysis framework, which comprises multidimensional scaling and sentiment analysis, alongside other methods, was applied to explore customers’ opinions. Findings – Making jokes in social media was a main trend in the tweets relating to Tesco during the Horsemeat scandal. Consumer sentiments were overall negative and burgers were the most mentioned product in the week-long period after the story broke. The posting of tweets was correlated with the timing of news coverage, which indicates that the traditional media is still crucial to public opinion formation. Practical implications – This paper presents a progressive tweet-mining framework that can serve as a tool for academia and practitioners in crisis management. The proposed framework indicates the significant importance of timely categorising the topics, identifying the sentiment of tweets and understanding the changes of consumer opinions over time in a crisis. Originality/value – The research presented in this paper is one of the limited social media research to focus on a UK food fraud issue and adds to the limited body of literature investigating consumer social media use from the side of industry practitioners.

The UK's Royal College of Surgeons (2016) has argued that health professionals must replace a 'paternalistic' approach to consent with 'informed choice'. We engage with these guidelines through analysis of neurology consultations in two UK-based neuroscience centres, where informed choice has been advocated for over a decade. Based on 223 recorded consultations and related questionnaire data (collected in 2012), we used conversation analysis (CA) to identify two practices for offering choice: patient view elicitors (PVEs) and option-lists. This paper reports further, mixed-methods analyses, combining CA with statistical techniques to compare the 'choice' practices with recommendations. Recommendations were overwhelmingly more common. There was little evidence that patient demographics determined whether choice was offered. Instead, decisional practices were associated with a range of clinical considerations. There was also evidence that individual neurologists tended to have a 'style', making it partly a matter of chance which decisional practice(s) patients encountered. This variability matters for the perception of choice: neurologists and patients were more likely to agree a choice had been offered if a PVE or option-list was used. It also matters for the outcome of the decision-making process: while recommendations nearly always ended in agreement to undertake the proffered course of action, option-lists and PVEs did so only about two-thirds of the time. While the direction of causality is unknown, this may indicate that patients are better enabled to refuse things they don't want when neurologists avoid recommending. We argue that our findings imply that neurologists tend to view choice as risky - in that the patient might make the 'wrong' choice - but that the inter-individual variation indicates that greater use of the more participatory practices is possible.

This article presents data from the UK Mass Observation Archive drawn from the 1982 Winter Food Directive, which focuses on memories of childhood food 'hates'. Through our analysis of these data, we identify three main findings: (a) there is a discrepancy between individual-level and collective aggregate level food hates, which problematises the notion of commensality; (b) a small but powerful 'outlier' group of respondents, which we refer to as 'visceral repulsors', show relatively extreme reactions to certain foods throughout their lives; and (c) the duration and temporalities of food hates can be used to sketch a rough model of change and continuity of food hates over the life course. Finally, the discussion focuses on the food hate trajectories through the life course, situated in a social context, to explore the implications the findings may have for food and health policy more generally.

This paper outlines a new method for investigating social position through geo-tagged Twitter data, specifically through the application of the geodemographic classification system Mosaic. The method involves the identification of a given tweeter's likely location of residence from the 'geotag' attached to their tweet. Using this high resolution geographic information, each individual tweet is then attributed a geodemographic classification. This paper shows that the specific application of geodemographics for discerning between different types of tweeters is problematic in some ways, but that the general process of classifying tweeters according to their position in geographical space is viable and represents a powerful new method for discerning the social position of tweeters. Further research is required in this area, as there is great potential in employing the mobile GPS data appended to digital by-product data to explore the intersections between geographical space and social position.

BACKGROUND Patient experience is a key outcome of health and care, a key component of quality of care and an important policy focus for the NHS. Patient experience of general practice can be influenced by using online consultation tools for access and triage. Patient experience is known to vary in relation to socio-demographic factors. OBJECTIVE Given the rapid scale up and diversity of online consultation tools in English general practice, we investigated the association between implementation of an online consultation tools and patient experience, and how that varied by the online consultation tool design and implementation model and practice socio-demographic factors. METHODS We categorised practices according to their usage of one of two online consultation tools which differed in their design and implementation model: ‘free-text’ (FT) with an embedded single workflow with supporting total triage; or ‘mixed-text’ (MT) with mixed input of free-text and logic based multiple choice without an embedded workflow supporting total triage. We considered survey responses from the General Practice Patient Survey in England in relation to domains of overall experience, experience of making an appointment, continuity of care and use of self-care before making an appointment. We used logistic regression models at practice level to explore association between usage of the online consultation tool and patient experience. RESULTS We included 287,194 responses from 2,423 MT and 170 FT practices. At MT practices increased usage was associated with reductions of more than 19% (P<.001) in experience across all dimensions other than self-care but an increase of 28% (P<.001) in self-care. Conversely, at FT practices increased usage was associated with improvements of more than 23% (P<.001) in experience across all dimensions other than self-care, but no effect on self-care. The association between usage and patient experience varied by practice socio-demographic characteristics. For example, greater improvements in overall patient experience with increased usage at FT practices in urban areas, and with the greatest proportions of younger and non-White ethnicity patients masked declines at the opposite cohorts of FT practices (in rural areas and with the smallest proportions of younger and non-White ethnicity patients). In general, inequalities in patient experience tended to narrow with increased usage reflecting greater improvements for groups that traditionally experience most challenges. CONCLUSIONS Online consultation tools offering free-text input and embedded using a single workflow with total triage can lead to improved patient experience of general practice and reduced socio-demographic disparities in access to care. However, stark differences in reported patient experience at practices using different online consultation tools suggest that careful consideration as to how online consultation tools are designed and implemented is required to achieve this. Generalising impacts across different online consultation tools is likely to be difficult or impossible.