Research from the SNS Counseling and Community Support Project Won the Excellence Presentation Award at the 85th Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association
Research from the SNS Counseling and Community Support Project won the Excellence Presentation Award at the 85th Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association (held online from September 1st (Wed) to 8th (Wed), 2021).
The COVID-19 pandemic poses not only a physical threat to people, but also has a significant psychological impact on them. It is said that the impact may be greater for those with certain psychological vulnerabilities, and support for them is necessary. Counseling using social networking services (SNS), which have been spreading rapidly in recent years, is a method of psychological counseling that can reach a wide range of people while minimizing the risk of infection.
The purpose of this study was to clarify the actual situation of SNS counseling during the COVID-19 pandemic using an interdisciplinary method that combines machine learning and clinical analysis, based on anonymized log data (from May to November, 2020) from the SNS counseling service specializing in the mental health related to the COVID-19 pandemic, as operated by the Osaka Prefectural Government.
First, the team used a topic model, which is a computational method of extracting topics, to extract the topics for each session along with the data collected before the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, they visualized the chronological changes of the topics of 11 people who accessed the SNS counseling more than 10 times before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was interpreted in conjunction with a clinical analysis of each case, and three types of cases were identified: 1) Anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic was used as an entry point to personal problems, 2) Concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic continued to be expressed, 3) Personal problems unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic were discussed from the beginning. This research discussed the clinical significance of each case type and the difference between SNS counseling and face-to-face counseling.
[Presentation Title].
SNS counseling in COVID-19 pandemic (II): Visualizing variations in repeater cases by topic modeling
[Presenter]
Masataka Nakayama, Chihiro Hatanaka, Yuka Suzuki, Hisae Konakawa, Tomoki Miyata, Yasushi Sugihara, Toshio Kawai
[Presentation Awards Page] (in Japanese)
https://psych.or.jp/prize/conf/
2022/03/23