How people talk about their illness in Internet? A preliminary study using the Spanish version of LIWC

Abstract

Computer-mediated communication has become a new source of informational or emotional support for many people suffering diseases around the world. Particularly, the number of newsgroups, forums or chats created for Spanish-speaking patients is increasing. In these groups, participants seek information and/or share concerns about their illness conditions. This give us the possibility of better understanding the illness experience through the analysis of postings contents and patterns of communication occuring in this virtual context. Text-analysis software has been designed to map linguistic and psychological variables of written messages and can be used to examine the postings from participants in Internet groups. One of the most used programs in English language is the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker et al., 2001). The LIWC analyzes written text on a word by word basis and calculates the percentage of the total words that matches up to 72 language categories and subcategories (linguistic dimensions, psychological processes, relativity and personal concerns). The objective of this study is to analyze the word choice of Spanish-Speaking people in online forums of different illness groups. Furthermore, we analyzed differences by gender. A total of 300 postings of participants in several Internet forums (diabetes, AIDS, cancer) were analyzed. The Spanish version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program, which has an internal dictionary of approximately 7000 words and word stems, was used to analyze the postings of the virtual forums. Results showed significative differences in several LIWC dimensions as a function of illness condition and sex.