Visualizing Social Sentiment: Designing an Interactive Dashboard for Informed Decision-Making

Abstract

Amidst a polycrisis involving global health emergencies, climate change, and geopolitical conflicts, decision-makers face the challenge of discerning relevant and reliable social sentiment information from vast data streams. This study addresses the need for near real-time insights into public attitudes to support data-driven policy-making. Utilizing design science research, we present a qualitative study (n=19) for the development of meta-requirements for an interactive dashboard displaying social sentiment data. It is based on sentiments from over 26 million data points collected biweekly since November 2022 from representative panels in Germany and the US. Thereby, this research aims to create a Policy Advice Sentiment Dashboard (PASD) that informs decision-makers, emphasizing data quality and methodological rigor. We explore additional attributes required for impactful information and variations in informational preferences among different decision-making groups. Our findings guide the development of a prototypical PASD, addressing the critical need for effective data-driven decision-making in governmental contexts.