Initial Stage of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Perspective on Health Risk Communications in the Restaurant Industry

Abstract

Restaurant online review websites have made changes to adapt to customers’ shifting needs during the COVID-19 crisis. Based on information behavior theory and social penetration theory, the present study investigated the changes in customers’ emotions and how the volume of online reviews as an indication of sales is impacted by the instructional (i.e., with quantitative variables) and emotional (i.e., with qualitative variables) information on review websites. By comparing the same month (January–April) during 2017–2020, positive sentiment experienced a plunge, while negative sentiment showed an upsurge in April 2020. The volume of reviews was impacted by five quantitative variables (i.e., confirmed COVID-19 case number, food delivery option, takeout option, delivery fee, and delivery time) and seven qualitative variables (i.e., anticipation, fear, trust, anger, disgust, joy, and sadness). This study provides new insight into understanding information content on review websites during the crisis (e.g., pandemic) from the perspective of health risk communication.

Characteristics of Collective Resilience and Its Influencing Factors from the Perspective of Psychological Emotion: A Case Study of COVID-19 in China

“…Textual review is a crucial channel for conveying emotion [ 55 ]. Using sentiment analysis tools to sift text, it is possible to derive a corpus containing three types of sentiment—positive, negative, and neutral—that captures the group’s sentiment tendencies and provides an adequate basis for analyzing the collective resilience of the community.…”