Students Working

Social media has become a primary source for seeking information by expectant and new parents about child-rearing. Hence, mothers’ forums are an excellent means for them to share their experiences and be supported by other mothers. While scientists know about the importance of this support need and how mothers obtain it, less is known about how this need changes over time. The goal of this study is to investigate how mothers’ need for peer support on online forums changes over time. In this project, we study this question on a dataset of 12 different forums from BabyCenter.com, a popular site among mothers, consisting of 240 thousand anonymized posts, randomly drawn from the year 2016. Various analytic strategies, such as descriptive analysis, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and analysis of linguistic features, are applied. 

The data is anonymized after collection, and the project does not study any specific individuals. Measures are undertaken to comply with Swiss privacy data protection laws.