Attitude of the Chinese public toward off-site construction: A text mining study

Off-site construction (OSC) has become the direction of China's construction transformation owing to the disappearance of demographic dividend and demand of environmental sustainability. Although the Chinese government has made efforts to promote OSC, its development progress remains slow. According to technology acceptance theory, the positive attitude and sufficient understanding of the public are of great significance to the advancement of new technology transformations. No relevant study has investigated people's awareness of OSC, and social media platforms provide big data for social science research. Accordingly, this study adopts web crawler technology combined with two methods of text mining, which are topic modeling and sentiment analysis, to explore public attitude toward OSC based on data collected from Sina Weibo. The research findings of this study are as follows: The attention status of the public toward OSC was greatly fluctuated but generally showed an upward tendency. The release of relevant government policies also significantly influenced the attention status of the public. What the public most concern about OSC was the building attributes and performance, such as connection issues, earthquake resistance, and waterproof property. Moreover, the Chinese public had relatively positive sentiments on OSC, and most of them expressed their interest and curiosity about OSC. The leading causes of public negative sentiments were safety issues, technical level, high prices, simplistic design and unemployment, indicating that popularization of the updated information on building performance, supportive policy and long-term significance of OSC was far from enough.