NCT03865498

Twitter Based Social Support for Hispanic and Black Dementia Caregivers

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

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 966 (actual)
• Sponsor: Columbia University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

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.

Detailed description

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

Conditions

• Loneliness
• Emotional Stress

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Twitter for Hispanic caregivers	This group will be asked to follow and use (i.e., retweet, reply, like) our Hispanic Twitter network for social support
BEHAVIORAL	Twitter for African American caregivers	This group will be asked to follow and use (i.e., retweet, reply, like) our African American Twitter network for social support.

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-01-12
• Primary completion: 2023-10-31
• Completion: 2023-11-20
• First posted: 2019-03-07
• Last updated: 2025-01-15
• Results posted: 2025-01-15

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States