Exploring Korean adolescent stress on social media: a semantic network analysis

BACKGROUND: Considering that adolescents spend considerable time on the Internet and social media and experience high levels of stress, it is difficult to find a study that investigates adolescent stress through a big data-based network analysis of social media. Hence, this study was designed to provide basic data to establish desirable stress coping strategies for adolescents based on a big data-based network analysis of social media for Korean adolescent stress. The purpose of this study was to (1) identify social media words that express stress in adolescents and (2) investigate the associations between those words and their types. METHODS: To analyse adolescent stress, we used social media data collected from online news and blog websites and performed semantic network analysis to understand the relationships among keywords extracted in the collected data. RESULTS: The top five words used by Korean adolescents were counselling, school, suicide, depression, and activity in online news, and diet, exercise, eat, health, and obesity in blogs. As the top keywords of the blog are mainly related to diet and obesity, it reflects adolescents’ high degree of interest in their bodies; the body is also a primary source of adolescent stress. In addition, blogs contained more content about the causes and symptoms of stress than online news, which focused more on stress resolution and coping. This highlights the trend that social blogging is a new channel for sharing personal information. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study are valuable as they were derived through a social big data analysis of data obtained from online news and blogs, providing a wide range of implications related to adolescent stress. Hence this study can contribute basic data for the stress management of adolescents and their mental health management in the future.