Publications by authors named "Margaret L McLaughlin"

The increasing incidence of dementia calls for effective and innovative approaches to alleviate societal and personal burdens. Aging in place is a sustainable paradigm which ensures the best utilization of societal resources, supports caregivers, secures normalcy, and optimizes care for persons with dementia (PwD). Home-based surveillance technology can support PwD in safely aging in place.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

E-cigarette use, or vaping, is undergoing a process of moralization in which issues about vaping evolve from being morally neutral to having discernible moral implications. Using Moral Foundations Theory, this study compared the moral narratives underlying polarized views about e-cigarette use and regulation. We integrated computational and human strategies by conducting the Chow test on the time series data and classification, topic modeling, and Chi-square tests on posts ( = 2,669) from 26 pro-vaping and 19 anti-vaping Facebook Pages.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

While social media have been found useful in providing social support and health information, they have also been home to content advocating risky health behavior. This study focused on how content defending and even celebrating anorexia as a lifestyle are circulated among social media users, and investigates the characteristics that promote wide propagation of such messages. We captured anorexia-related content on Tumblr, a popular blog for talking about eating disorders, during a one-month period.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans are disproportionately affected by cancer, yet underrepresented in cancer clinical trials. Because of this, it is important to understand how attitudes and beliefs about clinical trials vary by ethnicity. A national, random sample of 860 adults was given an online survey about attitudes toward clinical trials.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Previous literature has suggested that examining Twitter messages can be productive for studying how the public shares and spreads health information on social media. Preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a promising approach to HIV prevention, yet there are many issues that may influence its effective implementation. This study examined social representations of PrEP on Twitter.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF