A Data Analytic Approach in the Thematic Classification of the Reasons and Perspectives of Adolescents’ Social Media Engagement

Abstract

Social media is one of the leading platforms where people and organizations meet. With the technological advancements in the world wide web, smart mobile devices and Internet connectivity, an increase in social media engagement is highly observable. People of all ages, one way or the other, has a social media account and their perspective, reasons, and content-preferences vary. In this study, the experience of social media engagement from the perspectiveof young people is analyzed and thematically classified using a data analytic approach which focuses on natural language processing (NLP).Results show that the social media engagement experience of the respondents reflects what social media is tothem and for themexpressed by their reasons and perspectives, respectively. The reasons of their engagement are basically connected to the contents and features of social media platforms that suit their purpose, intention, and goals of engagementexpressed by textual response and analyzed by a learning algorithm that fits multiclass models for support vector machines(SVM). The profound social media engagement of the youth leads to a wide spectrum of responses and behaviors that would affect their mental healthas defined by their reasons and perspectives