How Professionals and Laypeople View Breastfeeding on China Internet: Text Mining Approach Methods (Preprint)
Authors: Fang Gege , Zhu Can , Lv Yuxiang , Chen Zhiyun 
Published: August 2022

BACKGROUND

During the decade of 2011 to 2021, the Chinese government introduced the universal two-child policy, the three-child policy, and other childbearing encouragement policies successively to slow down the trend of aging of population. With the growing attention to reproductive health, what has been widely discussed is whether breastfeeding should be carried on and whether it is the optimal way of feeding to secure infant development and maternal health.

OBJECTIVE

Usually, breastfeeding is the first step after a female officially becomes a mother. It is vitally significant to study how females receive external information in a positive and proper manner for lactational decision-making and feeding behavior. This paper adopted the big data digging and content analysis methods to explore the expression difference in the topic of breastfeeding between professionals and laypeople among the network community.

METHODS

100 questions and 4447 corresponding answers to them were collected from China-based question and answer forum Zhihu. These answers were tagged by manual and classified into three categories of subjects: “breastfeeding experience”, “family relationship”, and “scientific knowledge”, under each of which the expression difference between professionals and laypeople was analyzed. At this stage, this study employed the automated text analysis on the length of answers, attitude distribution, and high-frequency words of the two groups. Further, it analyzed the degree of participation and the emotion of both groups in different topics by structural topic modeling (STM).

RESULTS

In terms of the number of participants, the degree of participation of professionals was far lower than that of laypeople; the topic of breastfeeding failed to arouse extensive participation of professionals as other health-related topics, such as COVID-19 vaccine, did in China’s internet. In terms of expression difference, the answers from professionals were longer than those from laypeople. Contrary to the professionals, who were more likely to show a positive attitude, the laypeople were more likely to show a neutral or negative attitude. The professionals participated in the most extensive topics under the subject breastfeeding experience and in offering the largest number of answers under scientific knowledge. In terms of the expression content, the professionals were committed to helping females promote the breastfeeding experience by recommending the corresponding instruments and methods. The laypeople were more interested in carrying out a horizontal comparison in different dimensions: On the one hand, they compared the difference between Chinese females and European and American females in the process of feeding infants; on the other hand, they also compared the advantages and disadvantages of the two options, breastfeeding and non-breastfeeding.

CONCLUSIONS

Under the discourse structure of professionals widely recommending breastfeeding, breastfeeding has been set as mainstream and politically correct. However, ordinary females such as those with lactational experience or mothers-to-be are breaking such a traditional concept. They have actively disclosed and compared the positive and negative impacts of breastfeeding in social media, trying diversified child-rearing styles. Compared with the traditional topic modeling method, STM can better depict the expression difference between different groups and provide a reference for childbirth policy makers and for professional organizations and practitioners delivering relevant services.