Adolescents are increasingly interested in weight control; hence, proper health education is important for helping them control their weight properly. This study was designed to pick out social media words that express adolescents’ diet behaviors, and identify the associations and types between such words and the behaviors. It used text-mining techniques and semantic network analysis for related big data collected from the Internet on adolescents’ diet behaviors. Text mining was used to extract meaningful information from unstructured text data, whereas semantic network analysis was used to understand the relationships between keywords. The top five keywords were “obesity,” “health,” “exercise,” “eat,” and “increase” in online news, and “exercise,” “eat,” “weight loss,” “obesity,” and “health” in blogs. The betweenness centrality of “appearance” was particularly higher than that of other centralities in online news. As a result of the CONCOR analysis, eight clusters each were identified in online news and blogs. This study’s results will serve as a basis for weight management-related intervention strategies, reflecting the perspectives of adolescents. It also has significance as basic data to provide correct information, and establish desirable weight control in the future.

Background Considering that adolescents spend considerable time on the Internet and social media and experience high levels of stress, it is difficult to find a study that investigates adolescent stress through a big data-based network analysis of social media. Hence, this study was designed to provide basic data to establish desirable stress coping strategies for adolescents based on a big data-based network analysis of social media for Korean adolescent stress. The purpose of this study was to (1) identify social media words that express stress in adolescents and (2) investigate the associations between those words and their types. Methods To analyse adolescent stress, we used social media data collected from online news and blog websites and performed semantic network analysis to understand the relationships among keywords extracted in the collected data. Results The top five words used by Korean adolescents were counselling, school, suicide, depression, and activity in online news, and diet, exercise, eat, health, and obesity in blogs. As the top keywords of the blog are mainly related to diet and obesity, it reflects adolescents’ high degree of interest in their bodies; the body is also a primary source of adolescent stress. In addition, blogs contained more content about the causes and symptoms of stress than online news, which focused more on stress resolution and coping. This highlights the trend that social blogging is a new channel for sharing personal information. Conclusions The results of this study are valuable as they were derived through a social big data analysis of data obtained from online news and blogs, providing a wide range of implications related to adolescent stress. Hence this study can contribute basic data for the stress management of adolescents and their mental health management in the future.