Investigating the construction professionals’ perspective on the new building safety act in the UK: A sentiment analysis of media data

• Existing research on public attitudes to fire safety and evacuation has predominantly employed traditional methodologies. • These methods fail to capture the full spectrum of how the public perceives fire safety regulations like the BSA 2022. • The BSA 2022 is well received and has the potential to improve building safety. • Policy makers can leverage on public sentiments to improve efficiency of building safety. Existing research on constructional professional 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 the stakeholders. Moreover, a significant gap exists in the literature regarding the broader population’s concerns about how the industry experts 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 BSA 2022. The study posits recommendations from the public’s sentiments for policy makers to leverage.