ABSTRACT
In Chapter 17, “Comparing Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes Online Communities: A Natural Language Processing Study,” communications senior Rachyl Jackson, summarized her study on the rise of social media in recent years, which has provided online users the opportunity to communicate with like-minded individuals all over the world. This is particularly true for patients with various diseases. Social networking sites (SNS) provide patients and caregivers with a central location for live healthcare advice and information. This study conducted a text analysis of the Twitter feeds of diabetes online communities (DOC) to answer two research questions: how do diabetes patients/caregivers engage … for self-management or peer support; what linguistic features to DOC patients/caregivers use, and how do these features differ in emotion, social and biological processes, and time orientation for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes? The study found that the two diabetic communities have different needs and are “vastly different.”
