Abstract
Selecting a birth control method is a complex healthcare decision. While birth control methods provide important benefits, they can also cause unpredictable side effects and be stigmatized, leading many people to seek additional information online, where they can find reviews, advice, hypotheses, and experiences of other birth control users. However, the relationships between their healthcare concerns, sensemaking activities, and online settings are not well understood. We gather texts about birth control shared on Twitter, Reddit, and WebMD -- platforms with different affordances, moderation, and audiences -- to study where and how birth control is discussed online. Using a combination of topic modeling and hand annotation, we identify and characterize the dominant sensemaking practices across these platforms, and we create lexicons to draw comparisons across birth control methods and side effects. We use these to measure variations from survey reports of side effect experiences and method usage. Our findings characterize how online platforms are used to make sense of difficult healthcare choices and highlight unmet needs of birth control users.
Abstract (translated)
选择避孕方法是一项复杂的医疗决策。虽然避孕方法提供了重要的好处,但它们也可能导致不可预测的副作用并受到谴责,这导致许多人在网上寻求额外的信息,可以在网站上找到其他避孕用户使用的 reviews、建议、假设和经验。然而,他们的医疗关注点、决策意识和在线环境之间的关系并不完全理解。我们收集了在推特、Reddit和WebMD等平台上分享的关于避孕的文章,这些平台具有不同的体验、监管和受众,以研究避孕是如何在网站上被讨论的。通过主题建模和手写注释的组合,我们识别和描述了这些平台上的主要决策意识实践,并创造了词汇表以比较避孕方法和其他副作用。我们使用这些工具来测量调查报告中提到的副作用经验和使用方法的差异。我们的发现描述了如何使用在线平台来解决困难的医疗选择,并突出显示避孕用户未满足的需求。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09295
