Twitter Based Social Support for Hispanic and Black Dementia Caregivers

Not Applicable

Active, not recruiting

• Conditions: Loneliness; Emotional Stress
• Interventions: Behavioral: Twitter for African American caregivers; Behavioral: Twitter for Hispanic caregivers

• Registration Number: NCT03865498
• Lead Sponsor: Columbia University

Brief 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.

Basic Information
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Recruitment & Eligibility
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Study & Design
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Trial Locations

Study Timeline

• Study First Submitted: 2019-03-04
• Study First Submitted QC: 2019-03-05
• Study First Posted: 2019-03-07
• Study Start: 2022-01-12
• Primary Completion: 2023-10-31
• Disposition First Posted: 2024-07-03
• Disposition First Submitted: 2024-10-25
• Status Verified: 2024-11
• Last Update Submitted: 2024-11-12
• Last Update Posted: 2024-11-15
• Study Completion: 2025-05-31

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: ACTIVE_NOT_RECRUITING
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 966

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)

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Exclusion Criteria

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

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Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: PARALLEL

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
African American dementia caregivers	Twitter for African American caregivers	De-identified followers of our African American dementia caregiver Twitter network will receive messages from the network (Twitter for African American caregivers' intervention).
Hispanic dementia caregivers	Twitter for Hispanic caregivers	De-identified followers of our Hispanic dementia caregiver Twitter network will receive messages from the network (Twitter for Hispanic caregivers' intervention).

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Emotional valence score	12 months	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).
Fraction of isolates	12 months	% 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.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Number of auto-detected small groups	12 months	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.
Number of individual posting activities with balanced communication type	12 months	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.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

Columbia University Irving Medical Center; 🇺🇸 New York, New York, United States