For example, researchers might use the Reddit API to gather all posts, comments, and replies made to a particular subreddit over a defined period and contain a specified keyword. For researchers interested in larger and more comprehensive data sets, Reddit’s publicly accessible application programming interface (API) can be used to gather batches of data at a time according to the parameters specified in the code. Among the options for collecting naturalistic data, researchers can simply use the search function within the Reddit platform to identify posts, comments, and replies with specified keywords. Īt the outset of this review, it was clear that Reddit facilitates a variety of research approaches and scales of inquiry for studying depression and anxiety. In turn, Reddit-based studies have a definitive place in the history of studying informal web-based mental health communities. For years, researchers have been attracted to the way these attributes facilitate candid naturalistic expressions and exchanges of mental health information. Reddit distinguishes itself from Facebook, Twitter, and other health forums with its pseudonymous user system and generous length allowance for posts, comments, and replies. Examples relevant to this review, which are established in terms of longevity, size, and user activity, include r/mentalhealth, r/depression, and r/anxiety. Reddit harbors a variety of mental health subreddits. Content moderation is performed by volunteer moderators dually tasked with upholding individual subreddit rules and platform-wide content policies. Users can also engage with content by granting upvotes and downvotes, which subsequently inform the default visibility of content to other users. Within subreddits, users can submit posts, respond to posts with comments, and reply to comments. Reddit is a social media platform comprising single topic communities called subreddits that are formed, maintained, and participated in by pseudonymous users. Methodological Characteristics of the Reddit Platform The remainder of the Introduction section expands on the methodological characteristics of the Reddit platform and grounds the idea of using publicly accessible social media data to study mental health from a historical perspective. By illuminating the scope and nature of the research landscape using Reddit data to study depression and anxiety, this review contributes to advancing understandings at the intersection of social media, research practice, and public mental health. Second, timely resources are needed to cultivate informed deliberation about the conceptual and ethical dimensions of using publicly accessible social media in research on sensitive health topics, such as mental illness, and in public health research and practice more broadly. The Reddit platform affords researchers unique methodological opportunities for studying depression and anxiety and warrants a focus that is exclusive of other social media platforms. First, no work has been done to synthesize the existing research on depression and anxiety using Reddit outside of a small selection of review articles that included Reddit-focused studies under broader topics of social media data and mental health. Approach to this research area with a scoping review is supported by 2 points of rationale. This scoping review is about understanding the landscape of research using the social media platform Reddit as a primary data source for studying depression and anxiety. The discussion platform Reddit has become a popular social media data source in this area of study, in part because of the unique ways in which the platform is facilitative of research. Interest in studying depression and anxiety using publicly available social media data has grown considerably in the past decade as widespread social media use has dovetailed with the rising global incidence of mental disorders.
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