Characterizing the Temporal, Emotional, and Social Patterns of Adolescent Substance Use Discussions on Reddit

2026-07-05

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of capturing adolescents’ naturalistic experiences with substance use, which has hindered the development of precise intervention strategies. To overcome this limitation, the research innovatively integrates hour-level temporal analysis, Transformer-based fine-grained emotion classification, and BERTopic topic modeling to systematically examine multidimensional features of adolescent-related discussions on Reddit from 2018 to 2023. The findings reveal significantly heightened discussion activity during weekends and late-night hours, with predominant expressions of sadness and fear. Four core themes emerged: peer relationships, family conflict, emotional distress, and specific substance use experiences. These results provide both empirical insights and methodological advances for understanding adolescent online behavioral patterns in the context of substance use.

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical developmental period marked by heightened emotional sensitivity, social stress, and vulnerability to substance use. However, traditional research methods provide limited access to adolescents' authentic experiences, hindering efforts to develop evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies. Social media provides a unique opportunity to observe adolescents' naturally occurring discussions about substance use, offering valuable insights into their opinions, emotions, and lived experiences that can inform early prevention and intervention strategies. In this study, we analyze large-scale Reddit discussions related to substance use among adolescents between 2018 and 2023. Leveraging hour-by-day temporal analysis, sentiment and emotion classification, and transformer-based topic modeling (BERTopic), we examine the interaction between time, emotion, and semantic content in adolescent substance use discourse. Our findings reveal pronounced weekend and late-night peaks in substance-related discussions, a dominance of negative emotions such as sadness and fear, and distinct semantic topics centered on peer relationships, family conflict, emotional distress, and substance-specific experiences. These findings advance our understanding of adolescent substance use in naturalistic online settings and provide empirical evidence to support the development of more timely, targeted, and evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies.

Problem

• adolescent substance use
• social media
• authentic experiences
• prevention strategies
• intervention strategies

Innovation

• temporal analysis
• emotion classification
• BERTopic
• social media mining
• adolescent substance use