Topic modeling of workplace bullying discourse following legal regulation in South Korea

Workplace bullying constitutes a major psychosocial hazard with downstream consequences for mental health, work performance, and population health. In South Korea, statutory provisions addressing workplace bullying were introduced under the Labor Standards Act and have been in effect since July 16, 2019. However, empirical evidence remains limited regarding how workers' self-reported, everyday experiences and response pathways are articulated and patterned in the post-legislation context, particularly within online help-seeking narratives explicitly labeled as "workplace bullying."

A total of 10,788 workplace-bullying-related question posts were collected from Naver Knowledge iN (South Korea) between July 16, 2019 and July 31, 2025. Comments and answers were excluded, and deduplication, minimum-length filtering, and relevance screening were applied. Korean text was preprocessed, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models were fitted. Topic solutions were evaluated using coherence and perplexity metrics; a 12-topic solution (K = 12) was selected for the full corpus, and a reduced 4-topic structure (K = 4) was used to summarize macro-level discourse frames.

Prominent themes encompassed hierarchical/relational conflict, work conditions and employment transitions (e.g., resignation, contracts, dismissal), and institutional responses (e.g., reporting, evidentiary documentation, investigation, disciplinary procedures, and legal consultation/disputes). Descriptive comparisons suggested that later-period discourse clustered more clearly around reporting, investigation, documentation, and legal advice, whereas psychosocial distress and interpersonal mistreatment remained salient across the study period.

Post-legislation Q&A discourse on workplace bullying appears to reflect layered narratives in which lived psychosocial distress coexists with salient procedural and evidentiary concerns. These findings have implications for public health implementation, underscoring the need for integrated prevention and response systems that reduce psychosocial burden while improving the accessibility and navigability of institutional processes.