CAN NEIGHBOURHOOD INDICATORS DERIVED FROM NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING OF LOCAL NEWSPAPER TEXT HELP US UNDERSTAND POPULATION HEALTH RESILIENCE AND VULNERABILITY?

Speaker: Eleojo Abubakar

It is of great interest to understand why some neighbourhoods experience markedly better, or worse, health outcomes than might be expected given the local deprivation. In this study, we use natural language processing (NLP) techniques comprising geo-referenced, topic modelling of local newspaper text data, to derive novel neighbourhood indicators that quantify the intensity of specific ‘themes’ in the local press for the city of Edinburgh. We explore whether spatial variation in these themes is associated with spatial variation in population resilience to poor health. We operationalise population health resilience using the residuals from a regression model that takes health outcome as the dependent variable and the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) as the independent variable. Of the 55 themes that emerged from the NLP analysis, sixteen (16) were significant determinants of neighbourhood health resilience across Edinburgh, with the strongest results observed for mental health. The themes that emerge capture aspects of community, civic/social participation and the nature of local services, that are not well represented in the SIMD (or other official neighbourhood data) and are theoretically plausible in terms of mechanisms underpinning their association with neighbourhood health resilience. This work foregrounds an emerging area of research through which social and cultural aspects of place that are neglected in official statistics might be captured using various internet text data that, if connected to places, bring potential for deeper understanding of spatial disparities in population health.

About the Speaker: Eleojo is a health geographer concerned with the role of location, place, and context in shaping health outcomes. He is adept at applying a wide variety of data science and spatial analysis methods. He is presently a Post-Doc Research Fellow in Social Data Science at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to this, he was a Post-Doc Research Associate in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow and a GIS specialist at Cathie Group, UK.