This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As extreme heat becomes more frequent and intense across California, knowing which communities are struggling and what kind of help they need is increasingly important for protecting public health. A new UC Irvine study suggests that part of the answer may be hiding in everyday conversations on social media.
Researchers analyzed 24,598 heat-related posts on Twitter, now X, from across California between 2016 and 2022. They found that where people live, how they get around and the resources available to them were associated with meaningful differences in how they talked about extreme heat—including whether they described its effects on their lives or discussed ways of coping with it. The findings, published in Environmental Research Communications, point to social media as a potential complementary tool for understanding how communities experience extreme heat and for developing more targeted public health interventions.
The study was conducted by Nicolas Rodriguez Garcia and senior author Suellen Hopfer of the Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health; Veronica J. Berrocal of the Department of Statistics; and Chen Li of the Department of Computer Science—both of whom are in the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences.
"Social media gives us another window into how people are experiencing heat in their daily lives," says Hopfer, associate professor of health, society and behavior. "Understanding those experiences can help us think more strategically about who heat-safety messages are reaching, where gaps remain and how communication can better support communities that are especially vulnerable." Extreme heat is a growing public health threat, and housing, income and occupation are known predictors of heat vulnerability. Rather than looking only at temperatures or heat-related illnesses, the UC Irvine team examined how people described heat's impact on their daily lives and the ways they coped with it.
This revealed that individuals living in RVs, vans or boats—termed "sensitive housing"—may benefit from targeted public health interventions designed to reduce indoor heat exposure. The researchers categorized posts according to whether people were discussing coping strategies—such as staying hydrated, using air conditioning, going to a pool or changing when they exercised—or life impacts, including health effects, disrupted work, canceled activities, concerns about pets or plants, changes in household expenses and other consequences of high temperatures. They then compared those patterns with county-level indicators related to income, housing, transportation and tree canopy.
In general, housing was correlated with posts about coping, while being an active commuter predicted life-impact posts. The researchers also used a large language model to help group thousands of social media posts based on how people talked about heat. They checked the model's results against a set of posts that the team had manually sorted and found that the model's accuracy ranged from 74% to 90% across the categories of heat impacts, coping strategies and "other." Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
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