Manuscript Supporting Data:"External Pressures from Public Discourse on Violence in Medical Settings Explored through Text Mining"

Abstract

Background Violence in medical settings has become a growing concern, yet its influence on medical students’ career resilience remains underexplored. This study investigates the external discursive environment surrounding medical violence and its potential implications for medical students’ professional identity and resilience.

Methods Using a Guided Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, we analyzed 14,890 microblog comments about medical violence incidents to identify core topics. Career adaptation and psychological capital theories provided the analytical framework, and sentiment analysis assessed emotional tones within the data. Sentiment analysis was conducted on the 14,115 microblog comments, with negative, positive, and neutral sentiments being classified based on the overall tone of each comment. These sentiment ratios were then used to characterize the emotional tone of the public discourse, serving as an indicator of the external psychological pressure facing medical students.

Results Three primary topics emerged: (1) occupational safety, highlighting public concerns over workplace risks and inadequate protections (53.8%); (2) professional ethics, reflecting moral dilemmas from the gap between societal expectations and resource constraints (23.6%); and (3) professional identification, showing the media’s role in shaping trust and perceptions of healthcare careers (22.6%).

Negative sentiment accounted for 33.1% of all comments and clustered in Topics 1 and 2. Positive sentiment represented 63.9% and appeared mainly in Topic 3.

Conclusions Predominantly negative discourse constitutes a significant environmental stressor that may pose challenges to medical students’ career resilience. Mitigation may benefit from requiring targeted mental-health support, improved workplace security and balanced media coverage.