Analyzing Informal Caregiving Expression in Social Media

Abstract

Caregiving is the act of providing assistance to an individual unable to perfom some daily living activities. Caregiving can be either paid or unpaid. An informal caregiver is an unpaid caregiver to an older, sick, or disabled family member or friend on a daily basis. Informal caregiving is associated with increased physical, mental, and emotional stressors contributing to poor health outcomes, caregiver burnout, and increased risk for institutionalization of the older adult care recipient. Informal caregivers manage their stressors through supportive services such as support groups or respite care, but little is known about how they use social media to share their caregiving experience. No work to our knowledge has investigated caregiver use of Twitter to share the caregiving experience.We collect and analyze tweets related to Alzheimer’s and Dementia. We present some insights on sentiment of the tweets, statistics of United States geographical locations of the tweeters, and the relationships of the care recipients. In our analysis we found that the majority of tweet sentiment was negative. Moreover, female care recipients are mentioned at a higher frequency than male care recipients in the tweets.