During a crisis, small and family-owned businesses tend to experience more severe economic consequences than their larger counterparts and often lack financial resources needed to weather the challenges brought about by the crisis. To comprehend the distinct challenges and concerns of small and family-owned businesses during a major crisis, this research study focuses on the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which had a catastrophic effect on businesses and societies alike. To that effect, we address two research questions: First, what topics pertaining to small and family-owned businesses do social media users discuss during the COVID-19 pandemic? To achieve this goal, we employ the BERTopic model, a state-of-the-art technique for topic modeling, to identify and categorize prevalent themes arising from the discourse. Second, what is the impact of major government announcements on these discussions? Specifically, we study how sentiments change around a major government announcement aimed at supporting small businesses in the face of the pandemic. Our findings suggest that government announcements do not change the negative sentiments for most of the topics. This highlights the ineffectiveness of government announcements in alleviating people’s concern related to small and family-owned business and underscores the importance of a better consultation process and communication strategy by policymakers. The implications of our study transcend recent COVID-19 effects, as World Health Organization (WHO) cautions that there could be even worse health and socio-economic crises in the future, and we need to be better prepared to handle subsequent devastating effects.

在危机期间，小型和家族企业往往比大型企业遭受更严重的经济后果，并且往往缺乏应对危机带来的挑战所需的财务资源。为了理解小型和家族企业在重大危机期间面临的独特挑战和担忧，本研究重点关注最近的 COVID-19 大流行，该大流行对企业和社会都产生了灾难性影响。为此，我们解决了两个研究问题：首先，在 COVID-19 大流行期间，社交媒体用户讨论了哪些与小型和家族企业有关的话题？为了实现这一目标，我们采用了 BERTopic 模型，这是一种最先进的主题建模技术，用于识别和分类话语中出现的流行主题。其次，政府的重大公告对这些讨论有什么影响？具体来说，我们研究了围绕政府旨在支持小企业应对大流行的重大政府公告的情绪如何变化。我们的研究结果表明，政府公告并没有改变大多数主题的负面情绪。这凸显了政府公告在减轻人们对小型和家族企业相关担忧方面的无效性，并强调了政策制定者改进咨询流程和沟通策略的重要性。我们研究的影响超越了最近的 COVID-19 影响，因为世界卫生组织 （WHO） 警告说，未来可能会出现更严重的健康和社会经济危机，我们需要更好地准备应对随后的破坏性影响。