Wall Street Journal
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Accessed 4 May 2013
May 1, 2013, 8:50 PM ET

Glaxo Mined Online Parent Discussion Boards For Vaccine Worries
The U.K. pharmaceutical company used text analytics to analyze public discussion boards on BabyCenter.com and WhattoExpect.com, to learn what factors motivate parents to either go ahead or delay vaccinating their children for diseases like measles and mumps, said Dominic Hein, executive director of the company unit that plans new vaccines. The two month project, conducted last year, collected only anonymized excerpts and topics from posts, and no user identities, the company said.

   The study concluded that parents often had a lack of “comfort” with the safety of shots, and were unconvinced that they needed to vaccinate their kids against diseases like measles and mumps. The text analytics software allowed Glaxo to gather the themes of thousands of posts into topical clusters like “safety,” “timing” and “comfort” and sentiments, like “happiness” and “unhappiness,” giving the company a broader, more candid view than what parents might express through an official survey or focus group…

http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/05/01/glaxo-mined-online-parent-discussion-boards-for-vaccine-worries/