Background: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has posed an unprecedented challenge to governments worldwide. Effective government communication of COVID-19 information with the public is of crucial importance. Objective: We investigate how the most-read state-owned newspaper in China, People’s Daily, used an online social networking site, Sina Weibo, to communicate about COVID-19 and whether this could engage the public. The objective of this study is to develop an integrated framework to examine the content, message style, and interactive features of COVID-19–related posts and determine their effects on public engagement in the largest social media network in China. Methods: Content analysis was employed to scrutinize 608 COVID-19 posts, and coding was performed on three main dimensions: content, message style, and interactive features. The content dimension was coded into six subdimensions: action, new evidence, reassurance, disease prevention, health care services, and uncertainty, and the style dimension was coded into the subdimensions of narrative and nonnarrative. As for interactive features, they were coded into links to external sources, use of hashtags, use of questions to solicit feedback, and use of multimedia. Public engagement was measured in the form of the number of shares, comments, and likes on the People’s Daily’s Sina Weibo account from January 20, 2020, to March 11, 2020, to reveal the association between different levels of public engagement and communication strategies. A one-way analysis of variance followed by a post-hoc Tukey test and negative binomial regression analysis were employed to generate the results. Results: We found that although the content frames of action, new evidence, and reassurance delivered in a nonnarrative style were predominant in COVID-19 communication by the government, posts related to new evidence and a nonnarrative style were strong negative predictors of the number of shares. In terms of generating a high number of shares, it was found that disease prevention posts delivered in a narrative style were able to achieve this purpose. Additionally, an interaction effect was found between content and style. The use of a narrative style in disease prevention posts had a significant positive effect on generating comments and likes by the Chinese public, while links to external sources fostered sharing. Conclusions: These results have implications for governments, health organizations, medical professionals, the media, and researchers on their epidemic communication to engage the public. Selecting suitable communication strategies may foster active liking and sharing of posts on social media, which in turn, might raise the public’s awareness of COVID-19 and motivate them to take preventive measures. The sharing of COVID-19 posts is particularly important because this action can reach out to a large audience, potentially helping to contain the spread of the virus.

Background: Depression is a growing concern among university students. Chatbots provide flexible, accessible, personalized psychosocial support. Delivering Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) sessions via chatbots may reduce depressive symptoms in university students. Aim: This study aims to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, safety, and preliminary efficacy of a chatbot-based MBSR intervention for university students with depressive symptoms. Methods: A rule-based MBSR chatbot was developed and evaluated with a single-group pretest–posttest study for university students in Hong Kong ( N = 30) reporting depressive symptoms, followed by the collection of their subjective feedback. The intervention lasted eight weeks. The primary clinical outcome was depression levels, with a range of secondary outcomes. Results: The chatbot-based MBSR program demonstrated satisfying recruitment, retention, and adherence rates. The safety of the program was confirmed by the absence of any adverse events directly related to the intervention, tracked from the onset of the intervention to the completion of data assessment. Significant improvements were observed in both primary and secondary outcomes. Participant feedback highlighted the benefits of the program and its effects on depressive symptoms. Conclusions: The program has shown feasibility, acceptability, safety, and preliminary efficacy in reducing depressive symptoms among 30 university students in Hong Kong. The intervention should now be evaluated in a randomized controlled trial with follow-up. This study highlights the potential role of chatbot-based interventions in mental health promotion, nursing, and clinical practice and will inform the subsequent development of innovative digital interventions to address mental health challenges faced by university students.

The recent outbreak of major economic, environmental and social incidents (e.g. privacy leakage, corruption) has put the blooming airline industry under spotlight. However, scant studies examined the trends and changes of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices through CSR reporting on the economic, environmental and social dimensions in the aviation industry. To fill the gap, the current study examines the economic, environmental and social themes of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards on CSR communication of the global airlines. Quantitative content analysis is adopted for analyzing and comparing the CSR themes in 105 CSR reports of 21 airlines in major leagues from 2013 to 2017. Our findings indicated a salient growing trend in CSR reporting in the economic dimension while GRI 201-Economic Performance was the most significantly reported sub-topic. Our study has also compared the CSR reporting practices between the APEC based airlines and EU based airlines. The results indicated that focus of CSR reporting was different in the two regions. This study provided a comprehensive understanding of how global airlines communicate their CSR practices and respond to stakeholders’ expectations via CSR reporting. This study informs both academics and practitioners about the changing trends of CSR development and reporting in the airline industry worldwide.

Communication is critical in a new health emergency because it motivates the public to take preventive actions. Prior research has shown that strategies including source credibility, information transparency and uncertainty reduction actions could enhance trust in health communication on social media. Yet research on how the government in China used these trust-building strategies to engage the public during the outbreak of COVID-19 is limited. Therefore, our exploratory study developed an integrated framework for conducting quantitative content analysis to examine how the most popular government-owned newspaper in China, People’s Daily, utilized a major social media platform, to engage the public. Our findings showed that accessibility to external links, provision of emotional support, and information on skills and resources were associated with increased public engagement with government COVID-19 posts. Insights gained can enable public health organizations and governments to focus on specific strategies to enhance public engagement.

As an emerging form of health care with accelerated growth in recent years, online medical consultation (OMC) has received extensive attention worldwide. Although the number of studies on OMC has increased substantially, few provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of OMC’s research constituents, themes, and trends. This study, therefore, extracted 1,801 OMC-related articles published in English from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database during the past 30 years and employed a bibliometric analysis of WoS and CiteSpace to examine major constituents’ distribution, collaboration relationships, themes, and trends. The results indicate that the United States, England, and China contributed the most to the proliferation of OMC studies. The United States had the greatest academic influence and the most collaborative connections, while China demonstrated the sharpest increase and most active development in recent years. However, there is a lack of substantial and close collaboration between researchers worldwide. The main themes of OMC research were Internet hospitals, COVID-19, mixed methods, online health community, and information technology. Researchers have recently shifted their attention to social media, management, efficacy, word of mouth, mental health, and anxiety. This review paper provides researchers and practitioners with a holistic and clear understanding of the features and trends of OMC research. It also identifies potential areas for future OMC research and sheds light on OMC practices.

Social networking sites offer an important means for increasing the accessibility and enabling new forms of health communication between the public and medical social influencers (MSIs). MSIs have a social presence and are perceived as a credible source of health-related information. A research gap, however, exists in understanding the communication strategies employed by MSIs and the factors driving the public to engage in health communication with MSIs. This study, therefore, developed a new conceptual framework incorporating health communication, dialogic and interpersonal communication by employing quantitative content analysis to examine public engagement with MSI communication on the largest microblogging site in China, Sina Weibo. The analysis yielded insights into how the usefulness of health-related information provided alongside the interactive dialogue and affective practices played an active role in engaging the public. The public sought health-related information primarily to address issues of concern for well-being and a high level of engagement in terms of online shares, likes, and comments was found. The use of multimedia made the site more appealing, resulting in likes while the expression of emotions by MSIs generated likes and comments. The need to connect with other online users and have a sense of community was reflected in engagement through sharing useful MSI posts by the public. By identifying influential MSIs on social networking sites, health information providers such as organizations and the government can raise awareness of health issues to foster a healthy lifestyle and contribute to better living in the community.