Intent mining framework for understanding online conversations on vaping to inform social media-based intervention design

The recent surge in the usage of e-cigarettes amongst youth has highlighted a long-standing societal crisis. To assist public health agencies in policymaking, past research often employed traditional survey-based methods to understand youth behavior, which suffer from response biases and scalability, are time-consuming, and their findings often lag the fast-changing public behavior. Our study fills this gap by using social media as a complementary data source to understand user intentions for vape usage at a large scale, thus, providing an alternative to traditional survey-based methods. In this paper, we propose a novel user intent mining framework under the guidance of social cognitive theory for health behavioral interventions that helps study user intentions across different social media platforms. We then employ this framework to investigate the feasibility of automated intent mining on social media by formulating a multi-class classification task, employing machine learning algorithms to classify a social media message across relevant intent classes: Accusational, Anecdotal, Informational, Justificational and Promotional. The analyses indicate that Accusational tweets and Anecdotal messages were most prevalent on X/Twitter and Reddit respectively. We further provide novel insights on the conversational context using topic modeling analysis and psychometric analysis consequently, informing intervention designs and assisting health analysts.