Microblog discourse analysis for parenting style assessment

Parents' negative parenting style is an important cause of anxiety, depression, and suicide among university students. Given the widespread use of social media, microblogs offer a new and promising way for non-invasive, large-scale assessment of parenting styles of students' parents.

In this study, we have two main objectives: (1) investigating the correlation between students' microblog discourses and parents' parenting styles and (2) devising a method to predict students' parenting styles from their microblog discourses. We analyzed 111,258 posts from 575 university students using frequency analysis to examine differences in the usage of topical and emotional word across different parenting styles. Informed by these insights, we developed an effective parenting style assessment method, including a correlation injection module.

Experimental results on the 575 students show that our method outperforms all the baseline NLP methods (including ChatGPT-4), achieving good assessment performance by reducing MSE by 14% to 0.12.

Our study provides a pioneering microblog-based parenting style assessment tool and constructs a dataset, merging insights from psychology and computational science. On the one hand, our study advances the understanding of how parenting styles are reflected in the linguistic and emotional expressions of students on microblogs. On the other hand, our study provides an assisting tool that could be used by healthcare institutions to identify students' parenting styles. It facilitates the identification of suicide risk factors among microblog student users, and enables timely interventions to prevent suicides, which enhances human wellbeing and saves lives.