User-Reported Issues with Mental Health Apps: A Machine-Assisted Topic Analysis of Social Media Posts (Preprint)
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Background: Mobile apps marketed to support mental health have become increasingly popular in recent years. Given their widespread use, it is important to identify issues that users experience while using such apps. Understanding these issues may provide insight into the safety and suitability of these apps for individuals seeking mental health support. Objective: Unlike existing research, where user experience issues have been identified through researchers' direct analysis of apps, this study aimed to generate themes relating to user experience issues using comments from app users themselves. An additional aim was to evaluate a human-in-the-loop machine learning approach using structural topic modeling (STM) to analyze vast volumes of data gathered from X (formerly Twitter, developed by Twitter, Inc). Methods: Data relating to five of the most popular mental health apps were collected from the X API using R. A machine-assisted thematic analysis approach combined STM with human qualitative analysis to interpret user-generated posts. An unsupervised topic-modeling approach was tested using models with 5-40 topics and differing covariates (ultimately, a model without covariates was selected). Two researchers independently conducted thematic analysis to interpret and contextualize model outputs. A structural topic model with 10 topics, each comprising 20 X posts, was selected as most appropriate for generating insights. Results: Using R (developed by the R Core Team), 79,703 X posts were collected via the X API relating to five popular mental health apps. After negative sentiment filtering, 19,603 posts remained. Posts spanned March 2006 (the launch of X/formerly Twitter) to December 2022. Researchers collaboratively labeled the 10 topics to identify the primary user experience issue represented in each. Topic 3 was discarded due to low coherence and inconsistency in relation to app user experience, and Topic 5 was discarded because posts reflected app X account activity rather than user experience of the apps. The remaining eight topics were organized into four themes. The first theme, guidance shortfall, included difficulties following guided meditations, challenges selecting appropriate content from large libraries, and incompatibility between app use and home environments. The second theme, technical difficulties, involved subscription access issues and technical faults within apps. The third theme, heightened emotions related to app-affiliated celebrities, captured both over-excitement linked to celebrity involvement and anger directed toward specific celebrities. The final standalone theme, negative impacts of sleep self-monitoring, demonstrated users reporting that tracking sleep adversely affected sleep experience. Conclusions: The combination of STM and human qualitative analysis of X posts identified several user-experienced issues associated with popular mental health apps, often linked to negative outcomes. This study provides evidence that STM can be combined with qualitative methods to rapidly analyze large-scale social media data and generate insights into user experience of mass-reach digital health interventions.
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Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction machine sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Le volet Gemma est une étiquette directe du modèle pour chaque travail de la base, lue sur la notice réduite au titre. Le volet Codex est un classifieur appris des 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et calibré sur les taux pondérés de l'échantillon; les champs sans appui suffisant ne portent aucun appel Codex. Le mode candidate est l'union des deux volets; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont pas des étiquettes humaines.
Scores du classifieur distillé par catégorie (deux têtes)
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,002 | 0,011 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,001 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,004 | 0,002 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Communication savante | 0,002 | 0,002 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,001 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,001 | 0,001 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,002 | 0,002 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule source (Gemma direct ou Codex distillé), pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».