JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Social media have substantially changed the way people deal with health issues. However, knowledge about how social media have changed the foci and methods in public health research is limited.

Objective:

The current study aims to uncover research themes, the roles of social media, and research methods in social media-based health research published from 2000 to 2018.

Methods:

This study adopted a bottom-up approach to identify related studies through searching the database of Web of Science using a list of search terms. A total of 2,946 studies were included. An unsupervised text mining technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, was used to extract latent research themes from the included abstracts. Manual coding and computer-assisted method were used to examine the research methods used in the retrieved studies.

Results:

This study identifies 25 research themes, covering different diseases, different population groups, both physical health and mental health, and other significant issues. Social media have played two main roles in public health research: One is to produce substantial research concern for public health research and the other is to provide research context for public health research. For substantial research concern, social media are used for intervention, for human–computer interaction, as a platform of social influence, and for disease surveillance, risk assessment, or prevention. For the research context, social media have been adopted as an integrated environment for public health research, as platforms to participant recruitment, and as data sources. While both qualitative and quantitative methods are frequently used, cutting-edge computational methods play a marginalized role in this area.

Conclusions:

Social media enable scholars to ask new research questions and employ new research methods in public health research.