Public discourse on violence in medical settings and its implications for medical students' career resilience: evidence from social media text mining

Background Violence in medical settings has become a growing concern, yet the potential relevance of this public discourse to the career-development environment surrounding medical students remains underexplored. This study investigates the external discursive environment surrounding medical violence and its potential implications for medical students' professional identity and resilience. Methods This study used computational text analysis of public comments on Sina Weibo about violence in medical settings. Guided LDA was applied to 13,101 comments containing at least one retained vocabulary term, while sentiment analysis was conducted on 14,115 comments with usable token sequences. Career Adaptability and Psychological Capital theories informed seed-word selection and the interpretation of the findings. Results Three primary topics emerged: occupational safety (32.9%), professional ethics (30.3%), and professional identification (36.8%) under dominant-topic assignment. Positive sentiment accounted for 63.9% of comments, negative sentiment for 33.1%, and neutral sentiment for 3.0%. Conclusions Positive sentiment predominated, but substantial negative sentiment remained. These patterns characterize a heterogeneous external discursive environment potentially relevant to medical students' career resilience, without establishing individual effects.