Exploring Gender Differences in Chronic Pain Discussions on Reddit
This research addresses gender disparities in pain experiences for chronic pain sufferers, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study used NLP to analyze gender differences in chronic pain discussions on Reddit, achieving an F1 score of 0.86 for gender classification and finding that female posts are more emotionally focused and certain conditions like migraines are more prevalent in females.
Pain is an inherent part of human existence, manifesting as both physical and emotional experiences, and can be categorized as either acute or chronic. Over the years, extensive research has been conducted to understand the causes of pain and explore potential treatments, with contributions from various scientific disciplines. However, earlier studies often overlooked the role of gender in pain experiences. In this study, we utilized Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze and gain deeper insights into individuals' pain experiences, with a particular focus on gender differences. We successfully classified posts into male and female corpora using the Hidden Attribute Model-Convolutional Neural Network (HAM-CNN), achieving an F1 score of 0.86 by aggregating posts based on usernames. Our analysis revealed linguistic differences between genders, with female posts tending to be more emotionally focused. Additionally, the study highlighted that conditions such as migraine and sinusitis are more prevalent among females and explored how pain medication affects individuals differently based on gender.