Investigating the Public Perception of the New UK Building Safety Act: A Sentiment Analysis of Media Data

Existing research on public attitudes towards fire safety and evacuation has predominantly employed traditional methodologies. While these methods have provided valuable insights, they are limited in their ability to capture the full spectrum of public. Moreover, a significant gap exists in the literature regarding the broader population's concerns of how the general public perceives and responds to building safety regulations, particularly in the context of new legislation like the Building Safety Act (BSA) 2022. To address these gaps, this study adopts a novel approach by analysing social media data, specifically YouTube, to capture a wider range of public sentiments towards the BSA 2022. A total of 3577 data points reflecting the general public's views were gathered, processed, and examined using sentiment analysis, k-means clustering and Latent Dirichlet Allocation text mining techniques for topic modelling. Findings reveal nine clusters each for the positive and negative sentiments. The overall findings reveal that the public expressed positive sentiments (20%), negative sentiments (4%), and neutral sentiments (76%) towards (Building Safety Act, 2022). The study posits recommendations from the public’s sentiments for policy makers to leverage on.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4945513