Social media analytics in nutrition research: a rapid review of current usage in investigation of dietary behaviours

Abstract

Objective: Social media analytics (SMA) has a track record in business research. The utilisation in nutrition research is unknown, despite social media being populated with real-time eating behaviours. This rapid review aimed to explore the use of SMA in nutrition research with the investigation of dietary behaviours. Design: The review was conducted according to rapid review guidelines by WHO and the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools. Five databases of peer-reviewed, English language studies were searched using the keywords ‘social media’ in combination with ‘data analytics’ and ‘food’ or ‘nutrition’ and screened for those with general population health using SMA on public domain, social media data between 2014 and 2020. Results: The review identified 34 studies involving SMA in the investigation of dietary behaviours. Nutrition topics included population nutrition health investigations, alcohol consumption, dieting and eating out of the home behaviours. All studies involved content analysis with evidence of surveillance and engagement. Twitter was predominant with data sets in tens of millions. SMA tools were observed in data discovery, collection and preparation, but less so in data analysis. Approximately, a third of the studies involved interdisciplinary collaborations with health representation and only two studies involved nutrition disciplines. Less than a quarter of studies obtained formal human ethics approval. Conclusions: SMA in nutrition research with the investigation of dietary behaviours is emerging, nevertheless, if consideration is taken with technological capabilities and ethical integrity, the future shows promise at a broad population census level and as a scoping tool or complementary, triangulation instrument.

Using social media analysis to study population dietary behaviours: A scoping review

“…There have been other scoping reviews undertaken to investigate studies using social media analysis in the field of health research more broadly 45–47 and one focusing on 34 nutrition studies was identified 25 . Of the 79 studies in the current review, only 11 overlap, which may be attributed to differences in search strategies.…”

“…Of the 79 studies in the current review, only 11 overlap, which may be attributed to differences in search strategies. Twenty‐one of the studies included here were published after the date of the other review's 25 search of databases (2020–2021). Nevertheless, commonalities were observed, including the finding that Twitter data was most commonly used, few were from the nutrition discipline and most studies were from the USA.…”

“…A prior review explored the use of social media analysis in 34 studies published 2014-2020 that investigated dietary behaviours using datasets of between four million and eight million posts, requiring the use of sophisticated analytical tools. 25 However, as outlined previously, this is not the only potential application for social media analytics because it can also be used to provide meaningful insights in smaller scale studies using manual scraping, coding and thematic analysis in data sets of less than 100 posts. 10,11 This scoping review aims to map existing studies that have used both manual and automated social media analysis to investigate food consumption and dietary behaviours of groups, communities and populations.…”

Exploring Food Consumption Trends on Twitter with Social Media Analytics: The Example of #Veganuary

“…#veganuary was used as an example to showcase the advantages of this new research area for studying emerging and spreading food trends. Given the importance of food consumption in the grand scheme of climate change, impact on the environment and health behaviour, consumer research must focus on dietary and health trends (Stirling et al, 2021). • Provides complementary insights for consumer studies when applied together with standard quantitative and qualitative tools.…”

“…#veganuary was used as an example to showcase the advantages of this new research area for studying emerging and spreading food trends. Given the importance of food consumption in the grand scheme of climate change, impact on the environment and health behaviour, consumer research must focus on dietary and health trends (Stirling et al ., 2021). Below we recap the advantages of Social Media Analytics and pose open questions for future research: Provides complementary insights for consumer studies when applied together with standard quantitative and qualitative tools. Allows detection of new trends and topics. Enables display of relationships between food trends and influencers. Can be used by producers to specifically design their products towards (niche) consumers. Can be used by policymakers to immediately identify how public health measures in the food space are working. Generates economies of scale in data collection: Big datasets are available to do research in a comparatively short amount of time. …”