Using Google Trends to assess the impact of global public health days on online health information seeking behaviour in Central and South America

Abstract

Background Public health awareness can help prevent illness and result in earlier intervention when it does occur. For this reason, health promotion and disease awareness campaigns have great potential to alleviate the global burden of disease. Global Public Health Days (GPHD) are frequently implemented with this intent, but research evaluating their effectiveness, especially in the developing world setting, is scant. Objectives We aimed to evaluate the impact of four GPHDs (World Cancer Day, World Diabetes Day, World Mental Health Day, World AIDS Day) on online health information seeking behaviour (OHISB) in five Central and South American (CSA) countries which differ in their stage of economic development and epidemiological transition (Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua). Methods Google Trends data was used as a 'surrogate' of OHISB. This was measured on the 28 days leading up to the GPHD, on the date of the GPHD, and on the seven days following it. The Joinpoint regression programme was used to perform a time trend analysis on the Google Trends data. This allowed us to identify statistically significant time points of a change in trend, which reflect significant 'changes' to OHISB. Results GPHDs were inconsistently effective at influencing internet search query activity in the studied countries. In situations where an effect was significant, this impact was consistently short-term, with Relative Search Volume level returning to precampaign levels within 7 days of the GPHD. Conclusions Our findings imply the need to revise GPHDs or create alternative health awareness campaigns, perhaps with a more long-term approach and tailored to the specific health needs of the CSA population. Developing effective preventive strategies is vital in helping combat the rising threat of NCDs in this region.

Reliability of Google Trends: Analysis of the Limits and Potential of Web Infoveillance During COVID-19 Pandemic and for Future Research

“…Nuti et al have previously found that a large multitude of papers lack the information needed to make them fully reproducible ( Nuti et al, 2014 ). Nevertheless, Google Trends has served and still serves as an excellent tool for infoveillance and infodemiology: in fact, even admitting that newspapers and newscasts can influence web queries, it provides a way to quantify the web interest in a specific topic more efficiently than any other methods historically used (e.g., population surveys) ( Amber et al, 2016 ; Dreher et al, 2018 ; Mohamad and Kok, 2019 ; Havelka et al, 2020 ). Moreover, it can be used as a complement to a traditional analysis ( Schootman et al, 2014 ).…”

Using Google Trends to assess the impact of Global Public Health Days on online health information-seeking behaviour in Arabian Peninsula

“…The independent variable was the Day ID, where the 29th of the 36 days represented the GPHD and the dependent variable was set to be the RSV value. The model assumed that the errors have a constant variance, and the number of joinpoints was set for a minimum of zero and a maximum of three [ 15 ]. The minimum number of observations from a joinpoint to either end of data was set to two and the minimum number of observations between joinpoints was also set to two.…”

“…No logarithmic transformation was applied to the data. For countries without trends, an average RSV value was calculated across the time period of 36 days [ 15 ]. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to assess any significant differences in the mean of RSV values between the selected countries for each GPHD.…”

“…The use of Google Trends allows for a cheaper, faster alternative to large data collection for testing the effectiveness of public health campaigns [ 3 ] and has been previously used to assess the impact of GPHD on OHISB [ 14 ]. The aim of this study is to assess the effect of Global Public Health Days (World Heart Day, World Mental Health Day, World Diabetes Day and World Hypertension Day) on online health information-seeking behaviour in countries of Arabian Peninsula (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates) [ 15 ].…”

Reliability of Google Trends: Analysis of the Limits and Potential of Web Infoveillance During COVID-19 Pandemic and for Future Research

“…in fact, even admitting that newspapers and newscasts can influence the trends of web queries, it provides a way to quantify the web interest in a specific topic more efficiently than any other methods historically used (e.g. population surveys) [21][22][23][24]. Moreover, it can be used as a complement to a traditional analysis [25].…”