Public Awareness of Freedom House Ambulance Service After Viewing .

Résumé

PurposeTo conduct an exploratory, descriptive trends analysis related to Freedom House Ambulance Service (FHAS) storyline.DesignMulti-method examination of Google Trends and Reddit data.SettingGoogle Trends and the subreddit r/ThePittTVShow.SampleWe extracted relative search volume (RSV) data from Google Trends 2 weeks before the episode aired on February 20, 2025 to 2 weeks after. We also searched r/ThePittTVShow for "Freedom House." We retrieved posts published prior to September 15, 2025 using RedditExtractoR, which were coded by 2 trained research assistants (RAs).MeasuresRSV for Google Trends. RAs coded Reddit comments for the presence or absence of specific content.AnalysisCalculation of percent change for Google Trends. For Reddit comments, calculation of descriptive statistics and cross-tabulations.ResultsRSV for "freedom house" increased 170% the day after the episode aired and remained elevated until 1 week later. Of the 196 relevant posts, 36.9% (n = 72) provided information about FHAS. Posts coded as emotional engagement (27.6%, n = 54) were often also coded as not knowing about FHAS (29.6%), n = 16) or reflection (24.1%, n = 13).ConclusionsThere is a temporal association between online searches about FHAS and storyline as well as online information sharing about FHAS via social media.