Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Nov 25, 2019
Date Accepted: Mar 2, 2020
Analyzing trends of loneliness through large-scale analysis of social media postings: Observational study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Loneliness has become a public health problem described as an epidemic and it has been argued that digital behavior such as social media postings affects loneliness.
Objective:
The aim of the study is to expand the knowledge on the determinants of loneliness by investigating online postings in a social media forum devoted to loneliness.
Methods:
We collected a total of 19,668 postings from 11,054 users on the loneliness forum on Reddit. We asked 7 crowdsourced workers to imagine themselves as writing one of 236 randomly chosen posts and administered the short-form UCLA Loneliness Scale (ULS-6) to them. After showing that these postings could provide an assessment of loneliness, we built a predictive model for loneliness scores based on posting text and applied it to all postings. We then analyzed trends in loneliness postings over time and the correlates of loneliness with other topics of interest.
Results:
Our results show that high degrees of loneliness are strongly associated with suicidality (HR=1.66) and with other detrimental behaviors such as depression and illicit drug use. Our data demonstrates that people who are lonely come from a diversity of demographics and interests.
Conclusions:
The results demonstrate the multidimensional nature of online loneliness and suggest new directions for future studies.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.