Abstract:

This paper proposes the development of a pedagogical activity through a qualitative and cross-sectional methodology in the subject of ‘Introduction to Business Management Studies’ in the degree of Business Administration of EDEM-Business School. The aforementioned activity constitutes a successful teaching innovation exercise as regards to the acquisition of the required learning outcomes and competences established within the course, as well as to the achievement of a (consensual and attainable) solution to a real problem faced nowadays and (freely) selected by the students: the lack of awareness about the cancer disease, and particularly about the cervical cancer, the fourth most common among women and one of the easiest to prevent through screening tests.

Especially, this research delves into Twitter analysis, a well-known social media messaging service acquired last October, 2022 by Elon Musk for $44bn (which was –more than– possibly the trigger for the choice by the students), that we argue to enable the monitoring of the general population health status in order to identify, prevent and (try to) solve community health problems, being able to design public interventions (or proposals in the case of students), that in this particular case could increase awareness and reduce deaths.

To do so, we collected all the available tweets using two search terms: #papsmear (241 tweets) and #papsmears (269 tweets), the most common way to refer to the cervical cancer preventive screening test worldwide. To expand the paper it could be appropriate to search for other synonym hashtags such as #papanicolaoutest or #cervicalcancertest. However, for the sake of simplicity and due to its scanty appearance and harder association with the test, we did not follow this alternative in our research. Besides, our sample covers a much longer period than other studies, collecting a total of 4 months in order to avoid potential information bias (and make it doable for the pupils). Thus, following prior literature, we categorized tweets in two different groups: ‘type of author’ who published the tweet and ‘type of content’. The majority of tweets came from ‘individual’ accounts (59%), followed by ‘organizations’ (27%) and ‘health professionals’ (8%). Regarding the content of the message, 67.60% were ‘personal experiences’ and 55.8% ‘awareness promotion’.

Our results clearly discern the scarce participation (and lost opportunity) of ‘health professionals’ and ‘organizations’, which after stating the power of Twitter in implementing critical prevention and treatment of health-related messages to the community, we might undoubtedly stand up for an increase of their activity. Hence, this trustworthy and accurate information would more easily arrive to ‘individuals’ (the most participative collective on Twitter –59% of the tweets– and primary objective of prevention policies) who would increase the outreach of the message, and thus, its impact. As a result, an impersonal message (but importantly: reliable) would become “closer” through ‘personal experiences’ (67.60% of all tweets). Hence, relevant conclusions and implications may be obtained with this analysis both for policy makers and the own Twitter users (mostly belonging to the ‘gen Z’, the students we have currently in class and which, for instance, check a 40% less the information received vs previous generations) that will help them to better understand the “hidden” potential of this tool and social media.

Keywords:

Monitor attitudes, strategic usage, social media, Twitter.