Capturing autonomous technology acceptance with structured text and content analysis of social media comments

Today, the number of cities involved in the road tests of different autonomous vehicles is dynamically increasing. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly important to understand people’s opinions about autonomous urban mobility. Although several social science studies address the acceptance of autonomous vehicles, most of the studies apply questionnaire methods. Furthermore, scarce information is available about how people formulate their opinion if there is no research framework, and they form their opinion spontaneously, especially in countries where the road test of autonomous vehicles is less common. The main aim of the present study is to find out the free and spontaneous opinion of the Hungarian population regarding autonomous vehicles. The method is the analysis of Hungarian-language comments about autonomous vehicles on the most popular social media platforms (Facebook and YouTube): 1,690 comments of 10 posts in total are analyzed in the form of software-supported structured text and content analysis.

Keywords: autonomous urban mobility, comment analysis, self-driving car, autonomous
urban delivery robot