Trends and challenges within Reddit and health communication research: A systematic review

Abstract

There is a growing body of health communication literature addressing health-related discourse across user-generated platforms. Specifically, Reddit, the 19th most visited website in the world, serves as a promising venue for understanding communication surrounding health concerns. Such studies apply a variety of theories and methodological approaches, analyze large corpora, and build predictive and descriptive models for public health communication. The current study investigates health communication literature in the context of Reddit, identifying major topics, theories, and methods employed across studies, as well as how health communication topics have evolved over time. We identify future research directions, proposing theoretical and methodological considerations as well as issues and practices to employ when researching health phenomena via social platforms.