Does Social Support (Expressed in Post Titles) Elicit Comments in Online Substance Use Recovery Forums? (2020)

Abstract: Individuals recovering from substance use often seek social support (emotional and informational) on online recovery forums, where they can both write and comment on posts, expressing their struggles and successes. A common challenge in these forums is that certain posts (some of which may be support seeking) receive no comments. In this work, we use data from two Reddit substance recovery forums: /r/Leaves and /r/OpiatesRecovery, to determine the relationship between the social supports expressed in the titles of posts and the number of comments they receive. We show that the types of social support expressed in post titles that elicit comments vary from one substance use recovery forum to the other.

## introduction in the united states (us), substance use disorder (sud) is one of the main causes of premature death @xcite . social media is often used by people with sud to seek support @xcite . online substance use recovery forums such as the reddit forum, /r/leaves -which focuses on discussions around quitting marijuana, provide a "safe space" where members -some of whom may be struggling with substance use, can freely communicate and seek help from other members. prior work showed that 10% of support-seeking messages on a forum focused on discussions around cancer received no comments @xcite . we find that supportseeking posts (across a 3 months time period) from /r/leaves follow a similar trend with 11% of posts receiving no comments, thereby leaving some users seeking support without adequate support. the following social supports: emotional and informational are crucial in online forums focused on discussions around health and well-being @xcite , where similar to prior work @xcite , emotional support sought in posts seek affirmation, encouragement, and compassion, while informational support sought in posts seek information or advice. reddit posts are made up of two sections: the title -which briefly describes the post, and the selftext -which describes the post in more detail. @xcite demonstrated that on reddit, user interactions such as voting and commenting on posts is guided by the title of the post (post-titles); thereby implying that readers utilize linguistic cues in the post-titles on reddit to decide whether to respond to posts. hence, in this work, we focus on analyzing the post-titles in two reddit substance use recovery forums /r/leaves and /r/opiatesrecovery. we measure the extent to which these post-titles seek emotional support and informational support and analyze their relationship with the number of comments they receive. we hypothesize that since the interests of users who belong to different forums focused on similar discussions differs @xcite , the type of social support (expressed in post-titles) that elicits comments may differ from one online substance use recovery forum to the other. understanding the relationship between the social supports (emotional and informational) sought in post-titles published in substance use recovery forums and the number of comments these posts receive is important partly because users join online health forums when going through a health care event such as cancer @xcite or recovering from substance use @xcite ; therefore, posts not receiving comments in these forums means that some users are not getting the necessary support they need. in non-health related forums, @xcite studied a reddit forum to determine the social and linguistic factors associated with posts in the forum that elicit responses. @xcite explored several reddit forums and determined that different forums use different language styles and there was a correlation between a forums language style and the responses to comments. @xcite examined the effect of language use in online forums on the reaction of members of the forums to comments. @xcite studied if incorporating multimodal features attracted user attention @xcite . in health related forums, @xcite examined the effect of different social supports users are exposed to in an online cancer forum and its effect on the duration of user membership in the forum. @xcite demonstrated that in an online cancer forum, members tend to respond with emotional support when users self-disclose negative information about themselves. @xcite studied communication in an online cancer forum and determined that members of the forum tend to disclose more negative information about themselves in public domains provided by the forums compared to the forums private domains. @xcite examined the relationship between the kind of communication received by members of an online cancer forum and their commitment to the forum. @xcite determined that over time, members of an online cancer forum change roles and that certain roles are predictors of prolonged commitment to the group. @xcite examined online weight loss forums and determined how support influences user behavior changes. @xcite analyzed different phases of opioid addiction in an online forum focused on discussions around opioid use recovery. our work is different from prior work in that we analyze posts published in online substance use recovery forums with the aim to determine if and how emotional and informational support sought in published posts in substance use recovery forums elicit comments from members of the forums. this study received exempt status from the university of pennsylvania institutional review board. ## dataset our dataset consists of posts and meta-data from two active reddit substance use recovery forums, /r/leaves and /r/opiatesrecovery, which have 147,000 members and 27,000 members, respectively, as of september 2020. /r/leaves is selfdescribed as "a support and recovery community for practical discussions about how to quit pot, weed, cannabis, edibles, bho, shatter, or whatever thc-related product you're using, and support in staying stopped". /r/opiatesrecovery is self described as "we are a group of people dedicated to helping each other kick the habit". we chose /r/leaves and /r/opiatesrecovery because these forums are the reddit substance use recovery forums focused on marijuana and opioid use, respectively, with the most number of users. typically in these forums, a member writes a post (title and selftext) and other members respond to the post by either voting the post up or down or writing a comment. in this paper, we focus only on the comment responses to posts. using google's bigquery foot_0 , which is a data warehouse containing data from reddit, we collected and processed all posts published in /r/leaves and /r/opiatesrecovery between december 2015 and august 2019 and collected the following data related to each post: the post-title, the user who published the post, the time the post was created, the comments the post received, and the number of comments the post received. ## social support several studies have shown the importance of the expression of emotional and informational social supports in forums focused on discussions around health @xcite @xcite . using a similar method from previous work by @xcite , we built two models to determine how much emotional and informational support, respectively, is sought in post-titles in our dataset. we had 3 annotators -who were health care professionals with graduate degrees and familiar with substance use recovery, to rate a sample of 1,000 post-titles from our dataset, on (i) how much informational support each post-title sought and (ii) how much emotional support each post-title sought; where informational support post-titles provide/seek advice or information and emotional support post-titles seek encouragement, understanding, or affirmation @xcite . similar to prior work, @xcite , the annotators rated these post-titles using a 7-point likert scale (1 meant "social support was not expressed in a posttitle" and 7 meant "social support was expressed a lot in a post-title"). to measure the reliability of the annotators, we used intra-class correlation (icc) @xcite , which measures annotator reliability when each post-title is rated by different groups of annotators; the icc for informational support sought and emotional support sought were 0.95 and 0.93, respectively. for each post-title, the annotator ratings were averaged, hence each posttitle had a score that ranged between 1 and 7 which indicated how much informational and emotional support was sought. ## does social support expressed in post-titles elicit comments? a challenge in substance use recovery forums is that several support-seeking posts do not receive any comments, thereby leaving some posters potentially without adequate support. in this section, we aim to determine if emotional and informational support expressed in post-titles elicit comments in /r/leaves and /r/opiatesrecovery. for our analysis, we select posts by users with 5 or more published results and discussion: tables 4 and 5 show the correlation between social support sought in post-titles and number of comments in /r/leaves and /r/opiatesrecovery, respectively. we observed that in /r/leaves, the average informational support sought by users in post-titles correlates more with the average number of comments received by these users compared to the average emotional support sought. also, we observed that in /r/opiatesrecovery, the average emotional support sought had a positive correlation with the average number of comments received compared the average informational support sought which had a negative correlation with the average number of comments received. these findings can benefit members of substance use recovery forums; for example, users seeking to elicit comments to their posts published on /r/leaves may use linguistic cues associated with higher informational support in their post-titles. also, the findings from this work can benefit substance use recovery forum moderators; given that there is a negative correlation between the informational support sought in post-titles in /r/opiatesrecovery, this potentially means that some users seeking informational support in this forum are not receiving support. hence moderators of the forum can come up with ways in which these informational support seeking posts receive comments; for example informational support seeking posts not receiving comments may be sent to moderators or users familiar with the support sought. ## conclusion we built two models to measure the extent of informational and emotional social support expressed in post-titles in two substance use recovery. we used these models to show the social supports that elicit comments in these forums.