Twitter Based Social Support for Hispanic and Black Dementia Caregivers

Loneliness Clinical Trial

— Tweet-S2  

Official title:

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

Clinical Trial Details — Status: Active, not recruiting

Administrative data

• NCT number: NCT03865498
• Other study ID #: AAAS3305
• Secondary ID: R01AG060929-01
• Status: Active, not recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: January 12, 2022
• Est. completion date: May 31, 2024

Study information

• Verified date: February 2024
• Source: Columbia University
• Contact: n/a
• Is FDA regulated: No
• Study type: Interventional

Clinical Trial 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.

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.

Recruitment information / eligibility

• Status: Active, not recruiting
• Enrollment: 966
• Est. completion date: May 31, 2024
• Est. primary completion date: October 31, 2023
• Accepts healthy volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers
• Gender: All
• Age group: 18 Years and older

Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria:

• 18 years of age or older
• Black or Hispanic, living in the U.S. including the U.S. territories
• a dementia caregiver with any duration, able to speak English or Spanish/bilingual
• must agree to terms of conditions of use and privacy policy and rules of one of the two dementia caregiver network (Hispanic @dcnh, Black @dcnaab), the Twitter user agreement of the terms of service, Twitter privacy policy and Twitter rules including intellectual property, violence, misconduct, abuse behavior, private information and spam and security
• use a smartphone or a feature phone (i.e., a cell phone with text messaging)

Exclusion Criteria:

• do not have de-identified Twitter account, children, not a dementia family caregiver

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Dementia
• Emotional Stress
• Loneliness

Intervention

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
• 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.

Locations

Country	Name	City	State
United States	Columbia University Irving Medical Center	New York	New York

Sponsors (3)

Lead Sponsor	Collaborator
Columbia University	Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute on Aging (NIA)

Country where clinical trial is conducted

United States, 

Outcome

Type	Measure	Description	Time frame	Safety issue
Primary	Fraction of isolates	% of the people who do not engage Twitter activities (i.e., retweet, reply, like, post) within the Twitter network for dementia caregivers: macro-level. 0% indicates no social isolates and 100% indicates all users with no Twitter activities.	12 months
Primary	Emotional valence score	Emotional valence (macro level) detected from text data (e.g., "This is so helpful" - emotion score +4, "I am sad"- emotion score -6). Emotional valence score ranges from -10 to +10; -10 indicates negative valence (bad) and +10 indicates positive valence (good).	12 months
Secondary	Number of auto-detected small groups	Meso level: number of small group automatically detected based on Twitter activities (i.e., retweet); for example 0 means no small-group activity detected, 7 small groups mean seven distinct cliques/grouping activities detected where the users are communicating, supporting and responding within our Twitter network.	12 months
Secondary	Number of individual posting activities with balanced communication type	Micro level: balanced communication triad, 2 or 3 people responding and communicating with equal or similar frequency; 0 reflects non-optimal communication indicating domination, avoidance or ignorance. 8 means there are 8 triads who maintain healthy communication.	12 months