Large-Scale Analysis of Online Questions Related to Opioid Use Disorder on Reddit
This work addresses the problem of understanding OUD-related information needs on social media for public health researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed natural language questions about opioid use disorder (OUD) on Reddit from 2018-2021, identifying six coarse-grained and 69 fine-grained categories of questions to uncover ten key areas of information seeking, such as drug sales and treatment.
Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a leading health problem that affects individual well-being as well as general public health. Due to a variety of reasons, including the stigma faced by people using opioids, online communities for recovery and support were formed on different social media platforms. In these communities, people share their experiences and solicit information by asking questions to learn about opioid use and recovery. However, these communities do not always contain clinically verified information. In this paper, we study natural language questions asked in the context of OUD-related discourse on Reddit. We adopt transformer-based question detection along with hierarchical clustering across 19 subreddits to identify six coarse-grained categories and 69 fine-grained categories of OUD-related questions. Our analysis uncovers ten areas of information seeking from Reddit users in the context of OUD: drug sales, specific drug-related questions, OUD treatment, drug uses, side effects, withdrawal, lifestyle, drug testing, pain management and others, during the study period of 2018-2021. Our work provides a major step in improving the understanding of OUD-related questions people ask unobtrusively on Reddit. We finally discuss technological interventions and public health harm reduction techniques based on the topics of these questions.