Health Communication through Chinese Media on E-Cigarette: A Topic Modeling Approach

Background: Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) have been a newsworthy topic in China. E-cigarettes are receiving greater consumer attention due to the rise of the Chinese e-cigarettes industry. In the past decade, e-cigarettes have been widely debated across the media, particularly their identity and their health effects. Objective: this study aims to (1) find the key topics in e-cigarette news and (2) provide suggestions for future media strategies to improve health communication. Method: We collected Chinese e-cigarettes news from 1 November 2015 to 31 October 2020, in the Huike (WiseSearch) database, using "e-cigarettes" (Chinese: "(sic)offspring;") as the keyword. We used the Jieba package in python to perform the data cleaning process and the Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling method to generate major themes of the health communication through news content. Main finding: through an analysis of 1584 news articles on e-cigarettes, this paper finds 26 topics covered with 4 themes as regulations and control (n = 475, 30%), minor protection (n = 436, 27.5%), industry activities (n = 404, 25.5%), and health effects (n = 269, 17%). The peak and decline of the number of news articles are affected by time and related regulations. Conclusion: the main themes of Chinese news content on e-cigarettes are regulations and control, and minor protection. Newspapers should shoulder the responsibilities and play an important role in health communication with balanced coverage.