DOI: 10.25340/r4/ca3ijq
title: Related Data for Thesis/Dissertation: Exercise and fitness contents on Reddit: An exploratory analysis

description: Health promotion professionals recognize that social media is an attractive literacy tool for use as part of physical activity, exercise, and fitness intervention (Nutbeam, 2017; Whitaker et al., 2017). However, therein lies questions as to how best to implement and achieve effective outcomes through such services (Moorhead et al., 2018). Past research has offered some insights. For example, Facebook support groups have influenced general physical and mental health (Frison & Eggermont, 2016; Wright et al., 2013). Public health authorities may see the use of social media platforms to guide and disseminate news to the nation in the near future (Eghtesadi & Florea, 2020). Public perceptions of exercise and fitness issues on Facebook have been analyzed (Jaggi et al., 2018; Carrotte et al., 2015). The discourse of fit bodies and specialized diets in females resonate closely in the Facebook narrative, and other research studies internationally (Wick & Harriger, 2018; Rojkowski & Schöps, 2021). Beyond doubt, there is an understanding among researchers that (1) social media content has influence on users and (2) the narratives on social media can affect users’ perception of exercise and fitness. While Facebook attracts millions of users, other social media platforms create different social understanding on fitness and exercise. Twitter users gather to discuss physical activity through fitness application and functions (Molina & Sundar, 2018; Vickey et al., 2013) Therefore, in pursuit of understanding exercise and fitness content and behaviour on social media, this brings about the importance of gathering and understanding information in various sources. Apart from one study which investigated the discussion on weight loss, there has been no other study analysing exercise and fitness discourse on Reddit. This study aims to be the first to explore, describe and analyze exercise and fitness content on Reddit community. Additionally, understanding what users browse and post on Reddit can allow better understanding of how the platform can be integrated into the realm of physical activity and exercise. Briefly, Reddit is a website where registered users anonymously follow and engage in communities (subreddits) of interest. From the perspective of health care professional and researchers, it would be beneficial to understand the key functionalities, use and structure of the Reddit portal which has more than 430 million monthly active users (Statista, 2021). Given that so little is known about the nature of information available in Reddit on fitness and exercise in the research realm, the aim of this dissertation is to unpack the existing information structure in Reddit and offer insights for future researchers interested in studying the Reddit data in a deeper fashion. Specifically, comments posted in the subreddit “fitness” will be examined in this thesis to understand the themes within. The foray into Reddit data through systematic research is not new outside of fitness. For instance, researchers have studied personal narratives, unique to Reddit, to detect mental disorders and stigmatic illnesses. (De Choudhury & De, 2014; Shen & Rudzicz, 2017; Tadesse et al., 2019). Such attempts involved analysing linguistic attributes manifested in the nature of the content and showed that registered users share more explicit information compared on other health forums, and social networking sites. Furthermore, Reddit scores can potentially create impact as posts with higher popularity and votes sits on a better position on the webpage, gaining more attention. Thus, there is value in exploring the types of themes that emerge based on the popularity of discussion threads and posts. The second study aims to explore the types of themes on Reddit using similar constructs to identify the role it potentially has in fitness and exercise. Most importantly, it aims to support the notion that social media enhance opportunities of impactful health intervention, and health effects (Carr et al., 2013). The study aims to explore Reddit’s capabilities of gauging the masses’ literacy of exercise and fitness hoping to determine the needs and interests of the masses for health professionals and future researchers to leverage. Four months of submissions accumulating to 143,996 posts were collected through an open Reddit API, in which the dataset comprises of a list of variables. The variables were further studied and thus were found to be capable of identifying discussion trees. Hence, 268 discussion trees were identified as contributing factors towards Reddit use in the “/r/Fitness” subreddit within the 4 months. Following this, the study identified distinctive topics in which drives Reddit users and the sentiments surrounding the discussion in this subreddit. Results indicated Reddit users discuss exercise and fitness in this subreddit and predominantly discussed about (1) diet in relation to the fitness workouts, (2) diet in relation to body composition and (3) exercise regimes and workouts (e.g., endurance and weight training). The diverse discussions are similar to other platforms (Karami et al., 2018) possibly due to the high volume of users (Statista, 2021). Additionally, the commonality for users to share information on workouts and exercise regimes resonates with the current literature which found that users do so to seek positive affirmation (Stagier & Merchant, 2013). As this further affirms the key functionality of Reddit, creating a community of users with the same interest, it is worth exploring future intervention in targeted populations. Secondly, discussions in the community tend to be generally neutral or positive. Contrary to findings on mental health communities, where posts were indicative of greater negative emotions (Shen & Rudzicz, 2017; Tadesse et al., 2019), users in this community very often were stories of own experiences and knowledge. This form of narrative is worth establishing as the users show engage in fitness and exercise with positivity or neutral rather than negativity. Interestingly, users in this community create a desired impression or behavior to exercise by sharing records such as fitness app use, playlists, or experiences. Given the current literature indicating great focus on disease prevention improvement in health status and disease prevention (Dieli-Conwright et al., 2018; Dasso, 2019; Rodriguez-Ayllon et al., 2018) or exercise prescription, and the tendency to engage in discussing non-acceptable health norms on social media (Jaggi et al., 2017), this finding comes new. Subsequently, the discussion of the current trends on the type of workouts, training modalities and apps used can allow researchers develop and implement fitness models. This study marks the first in developing a detailed description of the processes to collect, analyze, interpret, and structure Reddit datasets. Consequently, the study explored the discussions around the Fitness subreddit and characterize the sentiments in relation to the discourse. It is worth noting that this model can be reproduced to future works to produce a more robust description of the fitness and exercise discipline on social media.