Social support and stress in autism blogging community on twitter

Abstract

At present about one percent of the world population is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). With the rising prevalence of children diagnosed with ASD, the United States faces shortage of autism expertise and resources for delivery of effective therapy to the people who need services. For families dealing with autism, social media has become a crucial part of life. Parents of children with autism use social media platforms to build social bonding with other parents of children with special needs, access information, and share experiences. Content from social media such as blogs and Twitter can be analyzed to extract knowledge that could help develop practical and useful learning tools for other families with autistic kids. The current study is aimed to provide a research-based understanding of conversations in social media among families with autism. We systematically analyzed relevant interactions among the autism blogger community on Twitter. The study revealed that the autism blogger community provides quite significant social support to its members in the form of information sharing and reaching out to other members. We further found that perceived social support facilitated by the community members could be very effective in reducing psychological distress for parents of children with autism and help them adapt to the challenges.