A Corpus-Based Study of Pregnancy Blogs and Self-Help Books

Social media platforms have been used in text analysis to identify emotions and experiences throughout the perinatal period. This research has identified differences in ways the perinatal period has been defined in literature and on social media. Minimal research on this topic currently exists. The current study aimed to highlight differences in Reddit blog posts and the top five bestselling books on the perinatal period. A keyword analysis was used to compare the corpuses. The three words with the strongest keyness in the literature were baby’s, women, practitioner, labor, and study. The words with the strongest keyness on social media were husband, people, weeks, love, and feel. To date, no studies have been conducted about words most associated with the term “depression” in the perinatal period; thus, this study aimed to find words most associated with the word stem depress*. A discussion of the results, implications for practice, and recommendations for future research are included.