Dillan Morell
Pronouns: he/him
Research Mentor(s): Elyse Thulin
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Addiction Center, Psychiatry & Michigan Data Science (MIDAS) / Medicine
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 2 (10:00am – 10:50am)
Authors: Dillan Morell, Elyse Thulin
Abstract
Utilizing social media for research is a topic that is relatively new to the research scope. However, with the rise of technology and a new wave of social media users that stretch across the globe, there is now a pool of information that has the potential to hold many different answers. The focus was to use Reddit, one of the largest public forum platforms on the internet which has had relatively minimal research done on it, in order to analyze how the issue of substance use of cannabis is portrayed on the internet. The first step to this process was discussing gathering the data in an effective manner to make the analysis process as simple as possible. Previous research has been done on effective methods, but there are two main choices: PRAW and Pushshift. PRAW is useful for current, updated user comments, but PushShift holds all Reddit data from the program’s infancy. Since the goal was overall analysis, the convenience of PushShift’s large corpus made it the most useful. Then, PushShift scraped the subreddits “r/Leaves†and “r/Petioles†because of their size and differing views on cannabis behavior change. The analysis of this data revolved first around Bag of Words and then sentiment analysis. The Bag of Words analysis held some important information on term-frequency and involved a lot of preprocessing, but the sentiment analysis is currently underway. While there has been research done in similar veins, the significance in difference may allow for predictive models of substance use using Reddit.
