Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Jul 27, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 30, 2019 - Sep 24, 2019
Date Accepted: May 15, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Lupus and Reproductive Health: Insights from User Conversations on the Social Network Twitter
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is the most common form of lupus. It is a chronic autoimmune disease that predominately affects women during the childbearing years, making issues of contraception, fertility, and pregnancy of the utmost importance to the affected patients and their family members. Although clinic-based studies have contributed to an increased understanding of reproductive health care needs among SLE patients, misinformation abounds and attitudes toward reproductive health issues among patients with lupus and their family members remain poorly understood. Social networks such as Twitter may serve as a data source for exploring how patients communicate about their health issues, thus adding a dimension to enrich our understanding of communication regarding reproductive health in this unique patient population.
Objective:
Objective:
The objective of this study is to conduct a content analysis of Twitter data published by users in English in the U.S. between 9/1/2017 and 10/31/2018 in order to examine attitudes toward reproductive health issues among patients with lupus.
Methods:
Methods:
This study will analyze user-generated posts that include keywords related to lupus and fertility from Twitter. To access public Twitter user data, we will use Symplur Signals, a healthcare social media analytics platform. Text classifiers will be used to identify topics in posts. Posts will be classified manually into the a-priori and emergent specific categories. Based on information available in a user’s Twitter profile (i.e., username, description, profile image), we will further attempt to characterize the user of the Twitter account who generated the post. We will use descriptive statistics to analyze the data and identify the most prevalent topics in the Twitter content among lupus patients.
Results:
Results:
This study has been funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) through a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) award. The Institutional Review Board at the University of Southern California (HS-18-00912) approved the study. Data extraction and cleaning are complete. We obtained 47,715 Twitter posts containing terms related to “lupus” from users in the U.S. published in English between 9/1/2017 and 10/31/2018. We will include 40,885 posts in the analysis, which will be completed in Summer 2019.
Conclusions:
Conclusions:
The findings from this study will provide pilot data on the use of Twitter among patients with lupus. Our findings will shed light on whether Twitter provides a promising data source for garnering insights and attitudes about reproductive health issues expressed among lupus patients. The data will also help to determine whether Twitter might serve as a potential outreach platform for raising awareness of lupus and reproductive health and for implementing related health interventions. Clinical Trial: N/A
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Copyright
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