Sensemaking About Contraceptive Methods Across Online Platforms

TL;DR

This study analyzes how online platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and WebMD facilitate sensemaking about contraceptive methods, revealing platform-specific practices and unmet informational needs of users.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-platform analysis of birth control discussions, combining topic modeling and annotation to characterize sensemaking practices and create comparative lexicons.

Findings

Different platforms support distinct sensemaking practices.

Lexicons reveal variations in side effect discussions across platforms.

Online discussions highlight unmet informational needs of birth control users.

Abstract

Selecting a birth control method is a complex healthcare decision. While birth control methods provide important benefits, they can also cause unpredictable side effects and be stigmatized, leading many people to seek additional information online, where they can find reviews, advice, hypotheses, and experiences of other birth control users. However, the relationships between their healthcare concerns, sensemaking activities, and online settings are not well understood. We gather texts about birth control shared on Twitter, Reddit, and WebMD -- platforms with different affordances, moderation, and audiences -- to study where and how birth control is discussed online. Using a combination of topic modeling and hand annotation, we identify and characterize the dominant sensemaking practices across these platforms, and we create lexicons to draw comparisons across birth control methods and side effects. We use these to measure variations from survey reports of side effect experiences and method usage. Our findings characterize how online platforms are used to make sense of difficult healthcare choices and highlight unmet needs of birth control users.