Daily life and women’ stressors through a structural topic modeling application of online messages

Abstract

Recently, women have increasingly been participating in online communities related to psychological health via Internet use to communicate their stressful events in daily lives to others who have suffered from similar experiences. To explore sensitive and relevant stressors among women and identify common types of stressor, we collected 54,195 documents posted from 10 February 2007, to 14 January 2020 from free discussion boards by age group (20s to over 50s) within the online community for women in South Korea (www.ezday.co.kr). Subsequently, we conducted the computer-assisted text analysis with structural topic modeling (STM) using 10,725 user-generated documents including negative emotional expressions about daily stressful events. Then, based on these results of latent daily stressor-related topics for aiding qualitative content analysis, the current study present multiple stressors as the cause of stress with eight topics (mismatch of expected role demands, problems/lack of communication, interpersonal discontinuity, physical and mental health, discomfort of living, role conflict in interpersonal relationships, problems with maintaining/choosing a career, and family caregiving burden). Consequently, our research suggests text-based analysis to better explore reactivity to stressors that women may disclose in everyday life by exploring the language of psychological stress expressed on social media.

Keywords

• daily stressor
• structural topic modeling
• textual communication
• online community