Reddit Forums Analyses Support Research on Complex, Shifting, and Contradictory Attitudes Toward Abortion: A Data Mining and Natural Language Processing Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Abortion attitudes have historically been dichotomized labels, yet research suggests these labels do not appropriately encapsulate abortion beliefs. Qualitative data has also been shown to underpin belief systems about abortion. Social media, as a form of qualitative data, could reveal how abortion attitudes depart from the dichotomy. OBJECTIVE This study applies Natural Language Processing and social media mining to analyze Reddit forums specific to abortion, including to identify potential themes within the data and predict affect from each post. METHODS We applied the following methods to analyze and visualize (n=5,128) posts scraped from Reddit: (1) term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) calculations (to assess term frequency), (2) k-means clustering (to group like words and phrases into themes), and (3) principal components analysis (PCA) (to visualize our data). We also applied a sentiment analysis to determine affect in our data. RESULTS Our analyses revealed six clusters: (1) Complex Abortion Beliefs (n=1,566); (2) Abortion Decision Making (n=1,162); (3) Defining Abortion Identity Labels (1,022); (4) Medication Abortion (n=746); (5) Asking for Advice (n=604); and (6) Reddit Forum Rules and Regulations (n=38). Sentiment scores were negative, indicating poor affect. CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggest people posting on Reddit abortion forums are willing to share their beliefs, which manifested in diverse ways including sharing one’s abortion story (and how their worldview changed), critiquing the value of dichotomized abortion identity labels, and information seeking. Collectively, our findings suggest abortion views do not always align with pro-choice and pro-life labels but mired in complexity.