Temporal and Computerized Psycholinguistic Analysis of the Blog of a Chinese Adolescent Suicide

Abstract

Background: Text analysis of personal documents provides insight into the cognition of those who complete suicide. Many personal documents are digitalized and easily found on the Internet, which can be used to advance suicide research. Aims: (1) To examine the temporal relationships between posting intensity and language use to sketch the suicidal process of a young man on the basis of his blog entries. (2) To investigate whether digitalized personal documents and paper documents of suicide cases have similar or different language patterns. Method: Firstly, 193 blog entries of a 13-year-old boy posted during the year prior to his suicide were analyzed using the Chinese Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (CLIWC) program. The temporal relationships between posting intensity and language use were illustrated by time series visualization. Secondly, the findings of this case study were compared with previous case studies from a systematic search of three Ovid databases. Results: Posting frequency and language use in the blog helped sketch the suicidal process of the young boy. In this case study, the ratio of positive to negative emotion words was associated with the posting trend. Progressive self-referencing appeared to be a primary predictive sign of suicide. However, the comparison did not show other clearly consistent patterns. Conclusion: Digitalized personal documents, when interpreted with other information of the individual, provide insight into the suicidal process of completed suicides. This study extends the findings of psycholinguistic analyses of suicides to the Chinese social context and online document form.