Investigating The Use Of Social Media In Relation To Cognitive Disabilities From The Arab Region

Abstract

This dissertation reports studies on social media usage in relation to cognitive disabilities from the Arab region. The first study investigated how social media is used in supporting and empowering Saudi caregivers of children with cognitive disabilities. Through interviews with 13 caregivers, we examined their motivations and concerns as well as the role of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that caregivers used social media with caution to seek information and emotional support, to spread awareness, and to communicate and build communities. The findings also suggest that caregivers face a great deal of challenges in security and privacy, social stigma and negative discussions, misinformation, as well as lack of resources. In the second study, we utilized text mining approaches, including sentiment analysis and topic modeling, to examine and understand how Arab users engage with Twitter to discuss cognitive disabilities. Content volume, temporal evolution, users, sentiment, topic discussed were iv analyzed. We applied Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) for sentiment analysis to identify the overall opinions and attitudes toward the researched neurological conditions. We also applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling to discover frequent topics in the collected dataset. Additionally, Gephi was used to map the interaction between users discussing cognitive disabilities on Twitter. The results provide new insights into public perspectives, which may assist interested entities to construct and distribute appropriate resources and information. In this dissertation, we presented the analysis techniques, discussed the findings, provided recommendations to interested stakeholders, and introduced potential opportunities and future directions.