What Are Our Patients Telling Each Other That They Aren't Telling Us? A Social Media Content Analysis Examining Prominently Used Open Source Groups on Social Media Platforms for Novel Solutions to Commonly Experienced Prosthetic ProblemsSeibert, Anna (2018) What Are Our Patients Telling Each Other That They Aren't Telling Us? A Social Media Content Analysis Examining Prominently Used Open Source Groups on Social Media Platforms for Novel Solutions to Commonly Experienced Prosthetic Problems. Master's Thesis, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished)
AbstractAim of the Study: The specific aims of this study were to investigate real-world social media interactions among the amputee community, targeting novel approaches to commonly experienced prosthetic problems. Potential areas of insight included information regarding challenges that were being faced, life hacks in use, advice being given across message boards, and negative impacts of their prostheses users experience that might be corrected with future research development if prosthetics practitioners were aware of the problems being discussed. Background: Social media content analysis has been used in the Technology and Communications fields for years, but it has only recently been applied to healthcare. After a review of the literature, it was determined that content analysis of social media has never previously been applied to the field of prosthetics and orthotics. Methods: The approach was to examine specifically identified, open-access social media groups across multiple social media platforms, data-mining posts and coding the information accordingly in order to perform statistical analysis across groups, subject matters, and social media platforms.Topics of interest included common prosthetic problems, comfort, cosmesis, skin type, comorbidities, emerging technologies, phantom pain, and prosthetics life hacks. Results: Statistical analysis was performed based on the numbers of postings pertaining to certain topics in order to compare data across social media groups, social media platforms, identifiable user demographics, and any other potentially pertinent relationships that could be analyzed. The outcomes for this project include the codes, the categories, and the resultant findings of the statistical analysis. Conclusions: The most commonly identified problem within the data was comfort. Facebook data proved more likely to have posters sharing stories, posters on Reddit were more likely to be asking questions. Advertisements were more prominent on Facebook while research-based posts were more common on Reddit. Life hacks were rarely discussed. Family members of amputees were more likely to discuss the injury location, cause, and comorbidities than amputees themselves were. Facebook posters were more likely to fall into the category of advocacy groups. Posters on Reddit were more likely to fall into the categories of health care providers, vendors, and those considering undergoing amputation surgery Share
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