Question: What are the quantitative methods suitable to do?
Evidence: As explained in the introduction, the overarching aim of this project is to investigate in how far information conveyed in social media posts can complement more traditional research methods in clinical psychology to get insights into the recovery experience of individuals with a BD diagnosis. Therefore, we will first conduct a systematic literature review of qualitative evidence to establish a solid base of what is already known about personal recovery experiences in BD for the subsequent social media studies.
Our research questions, which regard the experiences of different populations, lend themselves to several subprojects. First, we will collect and analyse English-language data from westerners. Then, we will address ethnically diverse English-speaking populations and finally multilingual accounts. This has the advantage that we can build data processing and methodological workflows along an increase in complexity of the data collection and analysis throughout the project.
In each project phase, we will employ a mixed-methods approach to combine the advantages of quantitative and qualitative methods BIBREF52 , BIBREF53 , which is established in mental health research BIBREF54 , BIBREF55 , BIBREF56 , BIBREF57 and specifically recommended to investigate personal recovery BIBREF58 . Quantitative methods are suitable to study observable behaviour such as language and yield more generalisable results by taking into account large samples. However, they fall short of capturing the subjective, idiosyncratic meaning of socially constructed reality, which is important when studying individuals' recovery experience BIBREF59 , BIBREF22 , BIBREF23 , BIBREF60 . Therefore, we will apply an explanatory sequential research design BIBREF53 , starting with statistical analysis of the full dataset followed by a manual investigation of fewer examples, similar to `distant reading' BIBREF61 in digital humanities.
Since previous research mainly employed (semi-)structured interviews and we do not expect to necessarily find the same aspects emphasised in unstructured settings, even less so when looking at a more diverse and non-English speaking population, we will not derive hypotheses from existing recovery models for testing on the online data. Instead, we will start off with exploratory quantitative research using comparative analysis tools such as Wmatrix BIBREF62 to uncover important linguistic features, e.g., on keywords and key concepts that occur with unexpected frequency in our collected datasets relative to reference corpora. The underlying assumption is that keywords and key concepts are indicative of certain aspects of personal recovery, such as those specified in the CHIME model BIBREF24 , other previous research BIBREF22 , BIBREF23 , BIBREF60 , or novel ones. Comparing online sources with transcripts of structured interviews or subcorpora originating from different cultural backgrounds might uncover aspects that were not prominently represented in the accounts studied in prior research.
A specific challenge will be to narrow down the data to parts relevant for personal recovery, since there is no control over the discussed topics compared to structured interviews. To investigate how individuals discuss personal recovery online and what (potentially unrecorded) aspects they associate with it, without a priori narrowing down the search-space to specific known keywords seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. We propose to address this challenge by an iterative approach similar to the one taken in a corpus linguistic study of cancer metaphors BIBREF63 . Drawing on results from previous qualitative research BIBREF24 , BIBREF23 , we will compile an initial dictionary of recovery-related terms. Next, we will examine a small portion of the dataset manually, which will be partly randomly sampled and partly selected to contain recovery-related terms. Based on this, we will be able to expand the dictionary and additionally automatically annotate semantic concepts of the identified relevant text passages using a semantic tagging approach such as the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) BIBREF64 . Crucially for the multilingual aspect of the project, USAS can tag semantic categories in eight languages BIBREF8 . Then, semantic tagging will be applied to the full corpus to retrieve all text passages mentioning relevant concepts. Furthermore, distributional semantics methods BIBREF65 , BIBREF66 can be used to find terms that frequently co-occur with words from our keyword dictionary. Occurrences of the identified keywords or concepts can be quantified in the full corpus to identify the importance of the related personal recovery aspects.
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) BIBREF67 is a frequently used tool in social-science text analysis to analyse emotional and cognitive components of texts and derive features for classification models BIBREF47 , BIBREF46 , BIBREF68 , BIBREF69 . LIWC counts target words organised in a manually constructed hierarchical dictionary without contextual disambiguation in the texts under analysis and has been psychometrically validated and developed for English exclusively. While translations for several languages exist, e.g., Dutch BIBREF9 , and it is questionable to what extent LIWC concepts can be transferred to other languages and cultures by mere translation. We therefore aim to apply and develop methods that require less manual labour and are applicable to many languages and cultures. One option constitute unsupervised methods, such as topic modelling, which has been applied to explore cultural differences in mental-health related online data already BIBREF37 , BIBREF36 . The Differential Language Analysis ToolKit (DLATK) BIBREF70 facilitates social-scientific language analyses, including tools for preprocessing, such as emoticon-aware tokenisers, filtering according to meta data, and analysis, e.g. via robust topic modelling methods.
Furthermore, emotion and sentiment analysis constitute useful tools to investigate the emotions involved in talking about recovery and identify factors that facilitate or hinder it. There are many annotated datasets to train supervised classifiers BIBREF71 , BIBREF3 for these actively researched NLP tasks. Machine learning methods were found to usually outperform rule-based approaches based on look-ups in dictionaries such as LIWC. Again, most annotated resources are English, but state of the art approaches based on multilingual embeddings allow transferring models between languages BIBREF4 .
Quantitative methods are suitable to study observable behaviour such as language and yield more generalisable results by taking into account large samples.
Answer: Quantitative methods are suitable to study observable behaviour.