Selecting a birth control method is a complex healthcare decision. While birth control methods provide important benefits, they can also cause unpredictable side effects and be stigmatized, leading many people to seek additional information online, where they can find reviews, advice, hypotheses, and experiences of other birth control users. However, the relationships between their healthcare concerns, sensemaking activities, and online settings are not well understood. We gather texts about birth control shared on Twitter, Reddit, and WebMD -- platforms with different affordances, moderation, and audiences -- to study where and how birth control is discussed online. Using a combination of topic modeling and hand annotation, we identify and characterize the dominant sensemaking practices across these platforms, and we create lexicons to draw comparisons across birth control methods and side effects. We use these to measure variations from survey reports of side effect experiences and method usage. Our findings characterize how online platforms are used to make sense of difficult healthcare choices and highlight unmet needs of birth control users.

本篇论文通过对 Twitter、Reddit、和 WebMD 等网络平台关于口服避孕药讨论内容的研究指出，网络平台的运用能更好地指引人们进行更复杂的医疗决策，并且强调了口服避孕药用户需要解决的相关问题。

在线平台上关于避孕方法的意义生成