We welcome researchers who wish to use The Third Family’s data to analyze the struggles faced by children and young people today and explore ways to address them.
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― A large-scale anonymous narrative dataset capturing adolescent voices ―
gedokun is an anonymous bulletin board operated by The Third Family. It functions as an online space where primarily elementary, middle, and high school students post worries and struggles related to family, school, LGBTQ+ issues, values, and relationships.
As of 2025, it has accumulated approximately 120,000 posts, making it a rare and substantial data source of naturally occurring adolescent narratives in Japan.
Surveys conducted through schools or government agencies have limitations:
gedokun, by contrast, is a bulletin board visited voluntarily through Google searches. Common search terms include “family,” “stress,” “advice,” “it hurts,” and “my parents are annoying.”
This suggests the potential to visualize the struggles of youth before they enter institutional or survey frameworks.
gedokun has no reply function. Because no advice or discussion occurs,
are limited in influence.
Rather than data generated from researcher-designed questions, the dataset consists of narratives posted spontaneously by users — a key characteristic.
Post content is free-text rather than multiple choice. This enables:
The ability to reconstruct adolescent struggles from the language itself — rather than forcing them into existing categories — is a major strength of this dataset.
As digital data, gedokun is suited for quantitative and computational social science approaches, including:
The 120,000-post scale enables research that moves between qualitative interpretation and statistical trend analysis.
Text mining and topic analysis have identified the following themes:
Frequent words include “parents,” “myself,” “want to die,” “family,” “school,” and “hate.”
gedokun is a space where users — including minors — anonymously share their struggles. Research use requires:
Research must respect that this bulletin board is an important “safe space” for its users.
gedokun is a valuable research resource combining:
It offers significant potential for research that reconstructs adolescent family struggles from language and data structure, rather than fitting them into existing frameworks.
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