Issues in Telepsychology: Abstract Analysis Using the Structural Topic Model

Abstract

This study extracted 12 topics from studies about telepsychology based on the text data of journal abstracts using the structural topic model (STM). Telepsychology is a psychological support approach that applies information technology (IT), internet communication technology (ICT), and so on. Using telephonic communication, videoconferencing, and so on, telepsychology offers a wide variety of support styles to tackle complex issues. There are few examples of telepsychology being applied in clinical practice in Japan. STM, an extended topic modeling method like the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), is a statistical modeling method using text corpora. STM can include psychological variables in models to indicate hot topics based on prevalence. Thus, we need to identify direct issues to which telepsychology can be applied in clinical practice. A total of 578 abstracts were analyzed using STM and the following were obtained: (1) word cloud, (2) overall prevalence of topics, and (3) transition of prevalence of topics. The results indicated 12 topics, of which 2 named “support for depression/anxiety” and “mobile app” had a high prevalence. In particular, the transition of the prevalence of topics revealed that “mobile app” prevalence has been increasing rapidly since 2010. The topic named “monitoring and prevention of high-risk symptom” was also increasing. Therefore, an issue that should be prioritized is offering preventive support for depression/anxiety using mobile apps.