Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Nov 26, 2019
Date Accepted: Mar 23, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Mental Health-Related Behaviors and Discussions Among Young Adults: Analysis and Classification
ABSTRACT
Background:
There have been recurring reports of online harassment and abuse among adolescents and young adults through anonymous social networks (ASNs).
Objective:
This study explored discussions on the popular ASN Yik Yak related to social and mental health behaviors among college students, including cyberbullying, to provide insights into mental health behaviors on college campuses.
Methods:
From April 6, 2016, to May 7, 2016, we collected anonymous conversations posted on Yik Yak at 19 universities in four different states and performed statistical analyses and text classification experiments on a subset of these posts.
Results:
We found that prosocial messages were 5.23 times as prevalent as bullying messages. Frequency of cyberbullying messages was positively associated with messages seeking emotional help. We found significant geographic variation in the frequency of messages offering supportive versus bullying messages. Across campuses, bullying and political discussion were positively associated. We also achieved balanced accuracy of over 75% for most behaviors and topics with a support vector machine classifier.
Conclusions:
Our results suggest that ASN sites can be mined for real-time data about students’ mental health-related attitudes and behaviors. This information can be used in education and health care services to better engage with students, provide insight into conversations that lead to cyberbullying, and reach out to students who need support.
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Copyright
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