Date of Award

11-28-2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Nitin Agarwal

Abstract

With increasing prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among the younger generation, there is a shortage of adequate resources to deliver care for the individuals dealing with autism. Families dealing with autism face enormous economic costs and emotional stress to provide care for personnel diagnosed with ASD. Globally, almost two billion people use social media regularly to connect and stay in touch with their friends, family, and acquaintances irrespective of distance. For the families dealing with autism, social media provide an open and easily accessible platform to share, gather and exchange information. Systematic analysis of this extensive interaction among autism community members on social media can be used to build a learning tool for others who are dealing with autism. Social sciences literature offer theoretical definitions for social support and stress. Leveraging these theoretical definitions, and employing concepts from linguistics and social network theory, in this work, we propose information-theoretic models to assess social support and stress. The proposed methodology not only enables us to estimate social support and stress in a health community but also evaluate the effectiveness of health communities vis-à-vis support provided by the community to its members. Using network-based measures along with linguistic measures, social support in an interaction can be gauged. Social network analysis along with psychosocial linguistics tests can help us measure stress experienced by the community members. The research design used in the study is also generic and applies to other online healthcare communities as well as general online or virtual communities, such as gaming, education, and learning. In the study, we systematically analyze the interactions among families of autism communities on different social media platforms to extract knowledge and to assess the support and stress propagated via those interactions within the autism community. We found that the autism community provides significant social support to its members both on Twitter and blogs. Our study also found that autism community members add minimal stress to the community. Social support facilitated by interactions with fellow autism community members helps in reducing the stress thereby improving the quality of life of the families dealing with ASD.

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