Has Sentiment Returned to the Pre-pandemic Level? A Sentiment Analysis Using U.S. College Subreddit Data from 2019 to 2022

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit data from U.S. colleges from 2019 to 2022 to assess how sentiment levels changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating a partial recovery in emotional tone post-pandemic.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of RoBERTa and GAT models for sentiment analysis on educational subreddit data across multiple years.

Findings

Negative sentiment increased during the pandemic

Sentiment shows signs of partial recovery post-pandemic

School-level factors influence sentiment trends

Abstract

As impact of COVID-19 pandemic winds down, both individuals and society gradually return to pre-pandemic activities. This study aims to explore how people's emotions have changed from the pre-pandemic during the pandemic to post-emergency period and whether it has returned to pre-pandemic level. We collected Reddit data in 2019 (pre-pandemic), 2020 (peak pandemic), 2021, and 2022 (late stages of pandemic, transitioning period to post-emergency period) from subreddits in 128 universities/colleges in the U.S., and a set of school-level characteristics. We predicted two sets of sentiments from a pre-trained Robustly Optimized BERT pre-training approach (RoBERTa) and graph attention network (GAT) that leverages both rich semantic and relational information among posted messages and then applied a logistic stacking method to obtain the final sentiment classification. After obtaining sentiment label for each message, we used a generalized linear mixed-effects model to estimate temporal trend in sentiment from 2019 to 2022 and how school-level factors may affect sentiment. Compared to the year 2019, the odds of negative sentiment in years 2020, 2021, and 2022 are 24%, 4.3%, and 10.3% higher, respectively, which are all statistically significant(adjusted $p$<0.05). Our study findings suggest a partial recovery in the sentiment composition in the post-pandemic-emergency era. The results align with common expectations and provide a detailed quantification of how sentiments have evolved from 2019 to 2022.