Sentiment Analysis of Childfree and (Brief) Implications to Public Health
There are certain topics that are deemed taboo and better left untouched, but as a curious person in the making, we gladly present to you: sentiment analysis of Childfree.
In Indonesia, childfree has been a sensitive, hot topic before. Its nature of controversy often stems from religion and sentiment regarding a position of woman in the society as well as marriage–often deemed as a legalized institution to reproduce legally. The norm has been normalized since years ago, but less that we know it is floating now to the public by this very public figure who is known to be both inspirational and controversial, that is Gita Savitri.
Gita Savitri is an Indonesian who lives in Germany with his boyfriend. She is quite open about her ideology, her way of life, etc of which many netizens assume to be revolved around western norms. She once talked about childfree and expressed her current life vision not to have children and by that, her words were twisted and got narrated to netizen’s own narrative. But that’s it for the background! We are researchers, not a group keen of gossiping people 😛
Sentiment Analysis
This sentiment analysis is relatively new (or so I believe, because there hasn’t been an increase of indexed articles in BMC Public Health which uses this kind of methods). This sentiment analysis is done by analyzing the title from the detik.com that is tagged as childfree. Why detik.com? Well, that’s because detik.com currently holds the largest segmentation for digital news readers in Indonesia, although we can’t say it’s representative, though.
This sentiment analysis is done quite easily. We just have to get the title for all 107 articles tagged with childfree. Why the title? Because, in our opinion, the title represents the notion of the story and how the narrator wants the reader to perceive the entire news–and most Indonesians read the news only by reading its title as our literacy rate is not great! However, to get there is the real story.
In this research, using my python skill, I tried to scrape the news title using BeautifulSoup. After that, I finish this research by analyzing it using the Orange Data Mining tool. Quite easy, right? But there has to be jobs done first …
Preprocessing
After scraping the data, the raw data needs to be preprocessed or to be processed in a way that will help us to get the real sentiment from the data. In total, 106 news titles are scrapped. Several features are deleted: comma, full stop, and any punctuations. The next step is to get rid of several conjunctions that hold no meaning nor do they carry any emotional substance, such as -di (in); -untuk (to); and -ini (this). In this preprocessing process, we also get rid of several numbers in the data as it may not be suitable for further analysis, e.g: ini 5 alasan mengapa Gitasav memilih childfree (this is 5 reasons why Gitasav chooses to be childfree). After doing this, our data looks just as fine as below:
If you take a look carefully at our word clouds, Gita Savitri is mentioned quite often with three different keywords: gitasav, gita, and savitri. This shows how Indonesians always associate her with this issue. Moreover, there is also one more celebrity mentioned in the word clouds, that is Rina Nose. Other than celebrities, there are also countries which have been excessively mentioned with this topic, that is Korsel (South Korea), Jepang (Japan), and also Thailand. There are also national institutions which seem to pay attention to this current topic, that are Unair (Universitas Airlangga, a local university), komnas (National Committee) and also BKKBN (Indonesia’s population fund). It is also fascinating that people also mention childfree along with another controversial issue in Indonesia, that is LGBT.
That being said, this word clouds also shows that religion is somehow mentioned along with childfree, shown by the words: Islam and also Muhammadiyah (a religion-based community, stems from Islamic community). Interestingly enough, our word clouds also shows that childfree is often deemed as a woman-oriented term, which raises a question for misogyny and patriarchy culture–as women and their reproductive health are mentioned frequently in this word clouds.
Sentiment Analysis
This sentiment analysis gives us three possible results: 0 for neutral statements; negative for negative statements; and also positive for positive statements, all results are stated quantitatively. To visualize this better, a heat map is created.
Detiknews’ title shows that emotion and sentiment are scattered in quantitative measures from scale -100 until 50; with the statement Jadi Ibu itu Berat, Saya Takut which translates into being a mother is not easy, I am afraid holds the most negative sentiment among our titles. The most positive title is Menua dan Bahagia Memilih tanpa Anak which literally translates into Getting older and Being Happy without Having a Child with a score of 50 in a positive measure. Moreover, the negative one in the heat map shows more of fear emotions, notably sex recession, population crisis, that may be explaining why they are deemed to be negative in nature. Conversely, some articles in the positive measures talk about the benefits of childfree, such as saving money and also rejuvenating-effect. We also like to note that this heat map is categorized by k-clusters.
Implications for Public Health Agenda
This research shows that there is indeed a variety of emotions in words that are used to describe childfree in Indonesia. However, we can’t say this research is quite representative as this does not really represent the actual opinion of Indonesian.
What’s the implications for public health? Well, too many. We can’t describe it in a detailed manner, but based on our word clouds we find that this childfree sentiment is heavily stigmatized for women–thus raising a concern for reproductive health, a field where Indonesia’s public health often ceases to exist. This also raises a question for more sex education and deep, thorough, and comprehensive education about consents as not to or to be childfree need consent from both parties involved in a relationship. We argue that this is often directly or indirectly adjacent with reproductive health fields as well as health promotion issues where local norms and reproductive health are often misunderstood to fit each their own narrative–patriarchy and misogyny. In another perspective, this also opens for another possibility to conduct thorough research using this kind of method in public health for perhaps another public health issue, such as vaccination, COVID-19, and so on, making public health a dynamic field accustomed to real trends and fluctuations in society 🙂.
