We compared emotional valence scores as determined via machine learning approaches to human-coded scores of direct messages on Twitter from our 2,301 followers during a Twitter-based clinical trial screening for Hispanic and African American family caregivers of persons with dementia. We manually assigned emotional valence scores to 249 randomly selected direct Twitter messages from our followers (N=2,301), then we applied three machine learning sentiment analysis algorithms to extract emotional valence scores for each message and compared their mean scores to the human coding results. The aggregated mean emotional scores from the natural language processing were slightly positive, while the mean score from human coding as a gold standard was negative.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe applied social network analysis to compare Hispanic and Black dementia caregiving networks on Twitter that were established as part of a clinical trial from January 12, 2022, to October 31, 2022. We extracted Twitter data from our caregiver support communities (N=1980 followers, 811 enrollees) via the Twitter API and used social network analysis software to compare friend/follower interactions within each Hispanic and Black caregiving network. Analysis of the social networks revealed that enrolled family caregivers without prior social media competency had overall low connectedness compared to both enrolled and non-enrolled caregivers with social media competency, who were more integrated into the communities that developed through the clinical trial, partly due to their ties to external dementia caregiving groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe applied machine learning algorithms to examine the relationship between demographics and outcomes of the social work services used by Hispanic family caregivers of persons with dementia recruited for a clinical trial in New York City. The social work service needs were largely concentrated on instrumental support to gain access to the healthcare system rather than other concrete services (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe applied social network analysis (SNA) on Tweets to compare Hispanic and Black dementia caregiving networks. We randomly extracted Tweets mentioning dementia caregiving and related terms from corpora collected daily via the Twitter API from September 1 to December 31, 2019 (initial corpus: n = 2,742,539 Tweets, random sample n = 549,380 English Tweets, n= 185,684 Spanish Tweets). After removing bot-generated Tweets, we first applied a lexicon-based demographic inference algorithm to automatically identify Tweets likely authored by Black and Hispanic individuals using Python (n = 114,511 English, n = 1,185 Spanish).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe randomly extracted Tweets mentioning dementia/Alzheimer's caregiving-related terms (n= 58,094) from Aug 23, 2019, to Sep 14, 2020, via an API. We applied a clustering algorithm and natural language processing (NLP) to publicly available English Tweets to detect topics and sentiment. We compared emotional valence scores of Tweets from before (through the end of 2019) and after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To compare the effectiveness of 2 caregiver interventions with known efficacy: the Resources for Enhancing Caregiver Health-Offering Useful Treatment (REACH-OUT) and the New York University Caregiver Intervention (NYUCI).
Design: 1:1 randomized pragmatic trial.
Setting: New York City.
Am J Alzheimers Dis Other Demen
September 2015
Background: Dementia prevalence and related caregiving burden are increasing, particularly among Hispanics. We studied the characteristics and mental health of Hispanic caregivers in New York City.
Methods: We recruited 139 Hispanic family caregivers.