Has sentiment returned to the pre-pandemic level? A sentiment analysis using U.S. college subreddit data from 2019 to 2022
Tian Yan, Fang Liu

TL;DR
This study analyzes sentiment changes in U.S. college Reddit communities from 2019 to 2022 to see if emotions have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Contribution
The novel use of model stacking with RoBERTa and GAT for sentiment analysis in a university subreddit context.
Findings
Negative sentiment odds in 2020, 2021, and 2022 were 25%, 7.3%, and 6.3% higher than in 2019.
Sentiment composition shows partial recovery in the post-pandemic period but remains significantly different from pre-pandemic levels.
Abstract
As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic winds down, both individuals and society are gradually returning to life and activities before the pandemic. This study aims to explore how people’s emotions have changed from the pre-pandemic period during the pandemic to this post-emergency period and whether the sentiment level nowadays has returned to the pre-pandemic level. We collected Reddit social media data in 2019 (pre-pandemic), 2020 (peak period of the pandemic), 2021, and 2022 (late stages of the pandemic, transitioning period to the post-emergency period) from the subreddits communities in 128 universities/colleges in the U.S., and a set of school-level baseline characteristics such as location, enrollment, graduation rate, selectivity, etc. We predicted two sets of sentiments from a pre-trained Robustly Optimized BERT pre-training approach (RoBERTa) and a graph attention network…
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Taxonomy
TopicsVietnamese History and Culture Studies · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations
