జర్నల్ ఆఫ్ సైకాలజీ & సైకోథెరపీ
అందరికి ప్రవేశం

నైరూప్య

Public Psychological Response to The Government's Medical School Quota Expansion Policy and Doctor's Opposition: A Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis Approach

Jimin Park, Sunah Hyun

In November 2023, the South Korean government announced a policy to increase medical school enrollment by 2000 students each year, ending the freeze that had been in place since. In response, the medical community collectively expressed resistance, resorting to strikes and resignation. This study investigates whether the public shares factual information or primarily expresses personal and psychological reactions to social phenomena. This study employed text mining techniques, including Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), structured topic modeling, and sentiment word analysis. The analysis focused on 1,10,227 comments from 432 YouTube news articles related to medical school enrollment between November 10, 2023 and June 9, 2024. To mitigate temporal and political biases, the samples were selected by distinguishing between political orientations and time periods. This analysis yielded several key findings. First, the TF-IDF analysis highlighted keywords such as patient, president, strike, and responsibility. Second, structured topic modeling identified three main topics, with topics 1 and 2 focusing on rational discussions concerning government policies, doctors’ perspectives, and the medical system. In contrast, topic 3 predominantly centered on the emotional public response to expanding medical school enrollment, capturing both supportive and opposing sentiments. Third, the sentiment word analysis underscored the notable imbalance between negative and positive words. Negative expressions (11,277) such as disgust, infuriation, worry, and threats, outnumbered positive words (6,827) by approximately 1.5 times. The most frequently used positive words were affection and gain. Based on the results, various implications related to the formation of public opinion on the issue, as well as people’s linguistic and psychological responses, are discussed.