Library and Information Science Commons^™

An Investigation Of Autism Support Groups On Facebook, Yuehua Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Autism-affected users, such as autism patients, caregivers, parents, family members, and researchers, currently seek informational support and social support from communities on social media. To reveal the information needs of autism- affected users, this study centers on the research of users’ interactions and information sharing within autism communities on social media. It aims to understand how autism-affected users utilize support groups on Facebook.

A systematic method was proposed to aid in the data analysis including social network analysis, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and inferential analysis. Social network analysis method was adopted to reveal the interaction patterns appearing in the groups, …