Text‐mining as a methodology to assess eating disorder‐relevant factors: Comparing mentions of fitness tracking technology across online communities

Abstract

The technique exemplified here can potentially be used to assess group differences to identify at-risk populations, generate and explore clinically relevant research questions in populations who are difficult to recruit, and scope an area for which there is little extant literature. The technique also facilitates methodological triangulation of research findings obtained through more 'traditional' techniques, such as surveys or interviews.

Engagement with MyFitnessPal in eating disorders: Qualitative insights from online forums

“…The current study represents an extension of a previous study (McCaig et al, 2018). As such, we used the previously written Python code (Python Software Foundation, 2017) to extract public comments posted on Reddit between May 2015 and January 2018 (inclusive) from a freely available archive (Complete Public Reddit Comments Corpus, 2015, July 9).…”

“…First, our approach ensures the relevance of the content to eating disorders by extracting comments from well-studied eating disorder-related forums, rather than a weight-loss application's forum. Second, our study provides more comprehensive substantive evidence by greatly increasing the sample size, established through scoping the data for relevant content in previous work (McCaig et al, 2018). Third, we focused on MyFitnessPal, which, as discussed, is important to consider for several reasons (i.e., popularity, focus of previous studies, supporting a wide range of functionality).…”

“…The aim of our current study was therefore to generate more comprehensive substantive evidence (i.e., qualitative insights) for the patterns of engagement with MyFitnessPal , as discussed by a large sample of commenters on online eating disorder‐related forums. MyFitnessPal represented a particularly important calorie‐counting and fitness‐tracking technologies to consider, as, of these types of technology, it has been found to be the most downloaded (Ferrara, Kim, Lin, Hua, & Seto, ) and the most commonly discussed in eating disorder‐related online forums (McCaig, Bhatia, Elliott, Walasek, & Meyer, ), and is the focus of three previously discussed studies in the area of eating psychopathology (Jospe et al, ; Levinson et al, ; Linardon & Messer, ). Furthermore, as MyFitnessPal facilitates both calorie‐counting and fitness‐tracking technologies, it is more representative of the varied functionality of these technologies than devices or applications dedicated to only one of these functions.…”

“…To achieve our aim, we extended our previous study that quantitatively assessed the mentions of fitness‐tracking technology across three eating disorder‐related forums on Reddit (McCaig et al, ), and we qualitatively analyzed comments from these forums that mentioned MyFitnessPal . Reddit is one of the largest online discussion platforms, and several researchers have used data from the platform to investigate eating disorder‐related topics (McCaig, Elliott, Siew, Walasek, & Meyer, ; Moessner, Feldhege, Wolf, & Bauer, ; Sowles et al, ).…”

Identification of genes related to mental disorders by text mining

“…[21] A study presented the application of text mining to assess and compare the interest in fitness tracking technology across eating disorder and health-related online communities. [22] Various methods can be used for text mining, among which clustering refers to classifying data into different categories according to the similarity between the original data. Association analysis describes and determines whether symbiotic phenomena occur in existing data, mainly reflecting the relevance between factors to evaluate the possibility of events occurring together.…”