How can a health organization save its reputation and retain public trust when they have to backpedal on health guidance that they published on on their official webpage?
Using trust repair theory, we find that public perception of an organization can improve after sudden changes in scientific guidance if the retraction
1) is initiated by the organization
2) acknowledges human error and
3) provides a corrective action
Using the CDC retraction of aerosol guidance for COVID, we developed a transformer BERT-based model to classify sentiment of CDC-related tweets. Given that preventative information during emerging infectious disease outbreaks can evolve quickly, organizations need to get the messaging right the first time, but if/when they don’t get it right, we need to know how to appropriately retract medical guidance.
Publication: Journal of Health Communication
Co-Authors: Christopher Beaudoin (Boston University), Eleanor Murray (Boston University School of Public Health)