This project uses Reddit as a trace of lived immigrant experience, focusing on users who move to Canada and document their journey across time. By reconstructing pre- and post-arrival timelines for individual users, the project studies how mental health markers, topics of concern, and forms of social support evolve around the migration event.

Goals

• 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 mental health indicators (e.g., anxiety, sadness, positive emotion) using LIWC and complementary classifiers.
• 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

• Large-scale collection of posts and comments from immigration-related subreddits (e.g., Express Entry, international students, newcomer communities).
• Pattern-based and LLM-assisted extraction of arrival-time expressions to estimate individual arrival years.
• Construction of relative timelines (pre-arrival, arrival, post-arrival) per user.
• Linguistic analysis using LIWC-derived markers and topic modeling to understand evolving concerns.
• Statistical tests to compare mental health and topical patterns across phases and cohorts (by arrival year).

Status and Outputs

• Status: Ongoing analysis.
• Planned outputs:
  • A research paper on immigrant mental health and integration trajectories using Reddit.
  • Methodological tools for reconstructing timelines from social media traces.
  • Ethical reflection on the use of public social media data in migration research.