Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Apr 9, 2024
Date Accepted: Dec 16, 2024
Teanager Substance Use on Reddit: A Computational Analysis of Frames and Emotions
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated substance use among teenagers in the United States, aligning with escalating mental health challenges and broader societal impacts. Despite the significance of this issue, there is a lack of understanding regarding teenagers' perspectives on substance use.
Objective:
This study aims to investigate discussions within the r/Teenagers subreddit to gain insights into teenagers' interpretations, causal attributions, and the broader social and psychological contexts that influence their discussions about substance use.
Methods:
Employing a frame approach, we systematically categorized topics and emotional undertones using BERT models, analyzing over 2 million posts from the r/Teenagers subreddit from 2018 to 2022.
Results:
Our analysis identified six primary frames through which teenagers discuss substance use: psycho-social impacts (52.1%), external risk attribution (21.3%), addiction (16.3%), stigma (5.3%), institutional impact (2.5%), and functional uses (2.2%). The emotional undertones linked to each frame offer insights crucial for developing tailored interventions.
Conclusions:
This study contributes to a deeper understanding of teenagers' perspectives on substance use, highlighting the importance of considering their interpretations and experiences when developing effective health communication strategies and interventions.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.