Effects of AIDS Public Information on HIV Infections among Gay Men

摘要

This paper shows that the time trend of HIV infections among gay mencould be forecast from persuasive information in the press. The principalmethodologies are detailed in Fan (1993). The mainstream press was likelyto be a good gauge of the persuasive information acting on the public forAIDS related topics because the news media could be used to forecast timetrends of public opinion and behavior for over a dozen topics (e.g. Fan 1988,Fan and McAvoy 1989, Fan 1993). The analysis began with the electronicretrieval from the NEXIS commercial database of the texts of 2462 out of8728 AIDS stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post fromJanuary 1, 1981 to February 12, 1992. The chosen stories contained theword 'AIDS' within five words of one of the word roots 'disease', 'illness'or 'immune'. The 8.0 million characters of retrieved text were scored bycomputer using the InfoTrend computer programs previously described (Fan1988). The algorithm depended on the occurrence of key words, their ordersin paragraphs and the distances between them. For the scoring, the analystenters a topic specific dictionary and a set of word relationship rules, usuallyabout 50 in number. The resulting scores are in the form of numbers ofparagraphs containing user specified ideas at specific times.