Understanding Norwegian youth online help seeking through bigdata analysis: what do their digital traces tell us?

Abstract

As digital natives, young people are familiar with seeking help through online media. Conventional research has studied youth online help seeking through survey and interview, yet it is now available to approach their actual behaviors through the digital traces thanks to the bigdata environment. Therefore, this dissertation aims at understanding youth online help seeking through large amounts of automatically saved data when they are using youth support media. For this, 285,447 questions from young Norwegians requesting advice from ung.no, a Norwegian public youth information website are used. Text mining on their questions is implemented along with additional analyses mixing data of timestamps and demographic information. It is found that the Norwegian young help seekers have patterns of specific times, and differences in topics according to their age and gender. In addition, a total of 29 demographic groups can be clustered into four with their similar contents of concerns. Studying online help seeking through big data and its analysis tools provides opportunities to supplement what previous studies have not been able to access and can be used as evidence of expansion of existing research boundary. However, concerning the quality and representativeness of bigdata, and validity in the research interpretation is still important as in any scientific research and certainly need to be considered more seriously.