Twitter Based Social Support for Hispanic and Black Dementia Caregivers

Using Twitter to Enhance the Social Support of Hispanic and Black Dementia Caregivers

The prevalence of dementia is higher in Hispanics and African Americans than non-Hispanic Whites. Moreover, dementia caregivers often experience loneliness as well decreased health status. The expansion of social media use among Hispanics and African Americans, particularly Twitter - a short message service - offers great promise for improving social support. This study aims to evaluate changes of discussion topics, sentiment and networking styles (i.e., number of followers) among anonymous followers of our two Twitter networks; the African American/Black dementia caregiver group and the Hispanic dementia caregiver group.

The study will utilize Twitter networks to post a daily message for dementia caregivers for a year, and set up a monthly group chat.

Inclusion Criteria:

• 18 years of age or older
• Black or Hispanic, living in the U.S. including the U.S. territories
• a dementia caregiver with any duration, able to speak English or Spanish/bilingual
• must agree to terms of conditions of use and privacy policy and rules of one of the two dementia caregiver network (Hispanic @dcnh, Black @dcnaab), the Twitter user agreement of the terms of service, Twitter privacy policy and Twitter rules including intellectual property, violence, misconduct, abuse behavior, private information and spam and security
• use a smartphone or a feature phone (i.e., a cell phone with text messaging)

Exclusion Criteria:

• do not have de-identified Twitter account, children, not a dementia family caregiver