Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Oct 19, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 22, 2018 - Dec 1, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 30, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Profiling commenters on eating disorder-related online discussion forums based on the other forums to which they contribute
ABSTRACT
Background:
Understanding the characteristics of commenters on mental health-related online discussion forums is vital for the development of effective psychological interventions in these communities. Previous research has typically investigated these characteristics using surveys or textual analyses of online content. However, the way in which commenters interact with each other can also elucidate the characteristics of these commenters.
Objective:
The current study applied text-mining and network analyses to profile eating disorder-related (EDR) forum commenters in terms of the other forums to which they tended to contribute.
Methods:
The researchers identified all public EDR-forums with ≥1000 comments posted between March 2017 and February 2018 on a large online discussion platform (Reddit), compiled lists of commenters (N=14024) on each of these forums, and identified other forums in which the commenters posted. Text-mining and a network analytic approach enabled the identification of four subgroups of forums (e.g., pro-eating disorder, thinspiration). Then, for each subgroup, further network analyses were conducted using the EDR-forum commenter-overlap between 50 forums on which the subgroup’s commenters also posted.
Results:
The results focus on two subgroups – pro-eating disorder and thinspiration – and communities of commenters within both subgroups. Within the pro-eating disorder subgroup, five communities of commenters were detected who posted on forums regarding the body, eating and exercise, women and appearance, mental health, and self-harm. Regarding the thinspiration subgroup, 75% of the commenters had also posted on pornographic subreddits, and 29% on forums concerning the body and eating. These thinspiration communities overlapped, with over a third of the commenters posting on body and eating-related subreddits also contributing to pornographic forums.
Conclusions:
The findings provide insight into the characteristics (i.e., interests) of EDR-forum commenters, and have implications for the design of online interventions. With the publicly available data and code provided, researchers can easily reproduce the analyses, or conduct the same analyses with different groups of commenters.
Citation
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Copyright
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