Anxiety, Alcohol, and Academics: A Textual Analysis of Student Facebook Confessions Pages

TL;DR

This study analyzes nearly 200,000 anonymous college student confessions on Facebook to understand how campus environment and real-world events influence disclosure topics, revealing patterns related to socioeconomic and health issues.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable method combining LDA and human verification to analyze large-scale online confessional data linked to real-world events.

Findings

Confessions about health and socioeconomic issues are more common at expensive private colleges.

Students disclose differently on sensitive topics across campuses but show similar temporal patterns.

Support is provided for taboo topics like health and socioeconomic status in anonymous confessions.

Abstract

What do college students reveal to their peers on social media under complete anonymity? Do their campus environments relate to the topics of their disclosure? To answer these questions, I analyze Facebook confessions pages. Popular on hundreds of college campuses, these pages allow students to anonymously post personal confessions on a public community forum. In this preliminary research note, I analyze several explanatory factors of online student confessional behavior. Aggregating nearly 200,000 confessions posts spanning a period of 3 years, I combine Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with human verification through Mechanical Turk to scalably identify topics in these online confessions. Where possible, I also link posts to real-world news events parsed from Twitter. I find that confessions mentioning socioeconomics as well as mental and physical health occur more often at top-ranking, expensive private colleges. While event-related confessions most often mention timely school-related events, many mention global and domestic events outside of the local campus sphere. Results suggest that undergraduates from different campuses disclose about topics such as race, socioeonomics, and politics differently, but in aggregate, post in similar patterns over time. Additionally, results confirm that anonymous Facebook confessors receive support for confessions on important, but taboo topics such as health and socioeconomic status.