Zarif Masud

PhD Student at the Faculty of Information

Immigrant Journeys on Reddit: Mental Health, Integration, and Everyday Life

Research ยท ICWSM 2027 (accepted)

This project uses Reddit as a trace of lived immigrant experience, focusing on users who move to Canada and document their journey across time. The resulting paper, Emotional and Informational Trajectories of Immigrants: A Longitudinal Study of Reddit Communities, has been accepted for ICWSM 2027.

Research Questions

  • Identify Reddit users who are immigrants to Canada and estimate their arrival year using arrival-time expressions and posting history.
  • Reconstruct pre-arrival, arrival, and post-arrival phases for each user.
  • Analyze changes in psycholinguistic markers of emotion and social orientation using LIWC.
  • Examine how topics like housing, jobs, immigration bureaucracy, finance, and social support shift over time.
  • Connect quantitative trajectories to theories of integration, stress, and adaptation in migration studies.

Methods

  • Collected 4,861,954 posts and comments from 9,834 self-reported immigrants to Canada with estimated arrival years between 2014 and 2024.
  • Used an LLM-assisted temporal inference pipeline to resolve arrival cues and reconstruct pre-arrival, arrival-year, and post-arrival timelines.
  • Combined LIWC-based psycholinguistic analysis with embedding-based topic clustering to compare language and concerns across the migration boundary.

Findings

  • Changes in overt emotional expression around arrival were modest. A stronger signal was a shift away from first-person singular expression toward collective, external, and family-related references.
  • Discussion shifted toward immigration procedures, employment, finance, housing, healthcare, and other settlement concerns around arrival.
  • Some acute procedural concerns receded after arrival, while cost of living, transport, finance, and housing remained prominent.

Status and Outputs