JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mental health is a highly stigmatized disease, especially for young people. College students increasingly use video-based social media for all aspects of information needs, including how-to tips, career, or health due to its free, accessible format. Such accessible format of video-based social media brings potential in supporting stigmatized contexts, such as college students’ mental health. Understanding what kinds of videos about college students’ mental health relate to increased viewer engagement will help build foundation to addressing stigma of mental health support through video-based social media platforms. Little research has been done to systematically identify video types, how video types have changed over time, and their effects on viewer engagement both short term and long term.

Objective:

This study aims to identify strategies of using video-based social media to combat stigmatized diseases, such as mental health among college student population. We identify who, with what perspective, purpose, and content, make up the videos available on social media (i.e., YouTube) that are about college students’ mental and how these factors associate with viewer engagement. We then identify effective strategies for designing video-based social media content for supporting college students’ mental health.

Methods:

We performed inductive content analysis to identify different types of YouTube videos concerning college student’s mental health (N=452) according to video attributes including poster, perspective, and purpose. Time analysis showed how video types have changed over time. Fisher’s exact test was used to examine the relationships between video attributes. Mann-Whitney U test tested the effect of video types on viewer engagement. Lastly, we investigated the difference in viewer engagement across time between two major types of videos (i.e., individuals’ storytelling and organization’s informational videos).

Results:

Time trend analysis showed a notable increase in the number of (1) individual’s videos, (2) videos that represent student’s perspective, and (3) videos that share stories and experiential knowledge over the recent years. Fisher’s exact test found all video attributes (i.e., poster, perspective, and purpose) are significantly correlated with each other. Mann-Whitney U test found poster (individual vs. organization) and purpose (storytelling vs. sharing information) type has a significant effect on viewer engagement (P<.001). Lastly, individuals’ storytelling videos had greater engagement not only short term but also long term.

Conclusions:

The study shows that YouTube videos on college student’s mental health can be well categorized by the types of poster and purpose of videos. Taken together, the videos where individuals share their personal stories, as well as experiential knowledge (i.e., tips and advice), engaged more viewers both short term and long term. Individual’s videos on YouTube showed a potential to support college student’s mental health in unique ways such as by providing social support, validating experience, and sharing the positive experience of help-seeking.