Publications and Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-16-2022

Abstract

Background: HIV mobile health (mHealth) interventions often incorporate interactive peer-to-peer features. The user-generated content (UGC) created by these features can offer valuable design insights by revealing what topics and life events are most salient for participants, which can serve as targets for subsequent interventions. However, unstructured, textual UGC can be difficult to analyze. Interpretive thematic analyses can preserve rich narratives and latent themes but are labor-intensive and therefore scale poorly. Natural language processing (NLP) methods scale more readily but often produce only coarse descriptive results. Recent calls to advance the field have emphasized the untapped potential of combined NLP and qualitative analyses toward advancing user attunement in next-generation mHealth.

Objective: In this proof-of-concept analysis, we gain human-centered design insights by applying hybrid consecutive NLP-qualitative methods to UGC from an HIV mHealth forum.

Methods: UGC was extracted from Thrive With Me, a web app intervention for men living with HIV that includes an unstructured peer-to-peer support forum. In Python, topics were modeled by latent Dirichlet allocation. Rule-based sentiment analysis scored interactions by emotional valence. Using a no v el ranking standard, the experientially richest and most emotionally polarized segments of UGC were condensed and then analyzed thematically in Dedoose. Design insights were then distilled from these themes.

Results: The refined topic model detected K=3 topics: A: disease coping; B: social adversities; C: salutations and check-ins. Strong intratopic themes included HIV medication adherence, survivorship, and relationship challenges. Negative UGC often involved strong negative reactions to external media events. Positive UGC often focused on gratitude for survival, well-being, and fellow users’ support.

Conclusions: With routinization, hybrid NLP-qualitative methods may be viable to rapidly characterize UGC in mHealth environments. Design principles point to ward opportunities to align mHealth intervention features with the organically occurring uses captured in these analyses, for example, by foregrounding inspiring personal narratives and expressions of gratitude, or de-emphasizing anger-inducing media.

Comments

This work was originally published in JMIR Human Factors and can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/37350.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Human Factors, is properly cited.

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