Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1
Department of Psychology, Psychology and Educational Science Faculty, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
2
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Science, University of Tehran, Tehran. Iran.
3
Department of Machine Intelligence and Robotics, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
4
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Science , University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
5
Department of Machine Intelligence and Robotics, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
The present study was conducted to investigate the information search behavior of Iranians on the Internet during the period of COVID-19 and investigated the relationship between the peak of the disease and the searches performed on the Internet. This research was fundamental in terms of purpose and descriptive in terms of research method. The statistical population is the searches performed by Iranians from February 2020 to April 2022, and the investigated sample was the searched concepts related to anxiety and mental health. The first part of the data was the searches that were extracted from the Google Trends website in December 2022, the second part of the data, the daily statistics of death and new infections were received from the Johns Hopkins University website. Data analysis was done with the Granger causality test and Pearson correlation using Python version 3.12. The results show that the search for concepts related to anxiety has grown at the beginning of the epidemic, the amount of searching for anxiety concepts at the beginning of the epidemic has a positive and significant correlation with the number of deaths due to the disease, in such a way that with the increase in deaths, the amount of anxiety searches should increase with an interval of few days. With the decrease in deaths, these searches decreased, but after a few months, the trend of anxiety searches decreased and no longer had a relationship with the number of deaths. At the beginning of the epidemic, the search for psychological treatment was small, but after 9 months, it increased, and with the increase in the number of deaths, these searches also increased. The results show that internet searches can be a useful tool for monitoring community concerns.
Keywords
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