Oral Healthcare Implications of Dedicated Online Communities: A Computational Content Analysis of the r/Dentistry Subreddit.

The current study explores communication expressed by participants in a subreddit surrounding oral health care, moderated by dentists and dental hygienists. The corpus was analyzed through Leximancer, a computer-assisted program used for computational content analyses of large data sets. Users' personal disclosures about ongoing dental concerns, advice about others' self-care, and the role of interpersonal communication with and among health care providers emerged as dominant themes. The findings suggest that online communities may serve an important role that dentists are unable to fill in their limited interactions with individual patients. Such interaction spaces may therefore offer a fertile environment for future interventions to promote beneficial practices and achieve positive health-related outcomes.

Social Media and Suicide: A Validation of Terms to Help Identify Suicide-related Social Media Posts.

BACKGROUND: Communication plays an important role in the prevention of suicide, a leading cause of death in the United States. Prior research suggests people who die by suicide often communicate their intent to more than one member of their social network. The ubiquity of social media in modern society means an individual's social network may be larger than ever before, which has contributed to a proliferation of colloquial terms and phrases to describe suicide. AIMS: The present study collected and validated suicide-related terms from the U.S. English language in 2018-2019. By validating clinical and lay terms with people on the front lines of suicide prevention, the study provides a necessary foundation for lexical analyses of suicide communication on social media. METHOD: 98 terms related to suicide were collected from online, academic, and other sources. Mental health professionals and members of the electronic mailing list of the American Association of Suicidology were asked to validate terms. RESULTS: The survey validated common terms used to communicate about suicide. LIMITATIONS: The lexicon did not capture international phrases. It also did not document less direct language, such as expressions of emotion.