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Article Summary
Background
Twitter has become a useful tool to assess and understand behaviors and attitudes in different sectors such as business, electronic monitoring, marketing among others. This is because Twitter had 320 million global users in 2015 and it is used by 23% adults in the US (Mikal, Hurst and Conway 2). The health sector is not also left behind in use of social media such as Twitter in monitoring population’s health, detection for early-stage disease outbreaks, public health surveillance, detecting changes in lifestyles and investigating public attitudes. Recently Twitter has been used in investigating mental health and associated risks including suicide rates and depression symptoms. The use of Twitter in the health sector does not come without issues, and ethical problems in research face it. The purpose of the study is to “analyze the attitudes and ethical beliefs of Twitter users towards the use of their public domain data for population-level health monitoring, particularly focusing on mental health issues.”
Methods
The preliminary work involved conducting online Skype interviews aimed at assessing participants response to potentially sensitive questions and the effectiveness of different recruitment strategies. The participants in the study were recruited from online forums, and they verbally consented. The researchers concentrated on recruiting from local community Internet sites as opposed to anonymous online mental health forums because they were not strategically fruitful. The study used a focus group interview strategy research design to encourage the generation of ideas through discussions. Focused groups are ideal for exploring new ideas, engaging participants, empower participants as an integral part of the research and emphasize the role of the interviewer. Twitter users were organized into two groups where the first group had a diagnosed history of depression while the other group did not. Participants from both groups were recruited through flyers and internet discussion boards in the western United States. The study used five focus groups conducted from March and April in 2015 for two hours each and audio was recorded (Mikal, Hurst and Conway 3). Two groups consisted of non-depressed members while the remaining three had members with a history of depression. Discussion questions were grouped into themes of Twitter use, privacy expectations, population mental health monitoring, individual versus aggregate mental health monitoring and participant views on regulating social media mining. The characteristics of the respondent group included 17m and eight females with their age ranging from 19-54 years, 16 had a diagnosed history of depression and from different professions.
Results
The analysis revealed that Twitter users had a sense of responsibility for what they posted. The study found that there were four patterns of use for Twitter. They used Twitter for professional promotion, social engagement, venting and to follow content. Participants indicated that they do not expect privacy when using Twitter because it is free while other expected some level of confidentiality. Participants had a common misconception that data is ephemeral meaning that accounts could be manicured or information could be retrieved. Participants did not understand their control over their own Twitter data. The participants also understood that the use of Twitter is a matter of personal choice and responsibility. Although participants were concerned about the use of Twitter data for public health, most of them agreed that it was for the social good (Mikal, Hurst and Conway 6). The concerns resulted in a fear of loss of individual privacy because the information was being monitored. There were also concerns that information posted could be taken out of context compromising confidentiality for people with mental health issues. Ethical issues of data accuracy also emerged.
Limitation: Limitations experienced in the study include presentation of qualitative data gathered and synthesized from in-depth focus group interviews, small sample size and a diverse western United States population (Mikal, Hurst and Conway 9).
Conclusion: The study concluded that it completes existing typologies and provides additional information to previous researches on data regulation, privacy expectations, and public/private interests from the use of Twitter.
Work Cited
Mikal, Jude, Samantha Hurst, and Mike Conway. “Ethical issues in using Twitter for population-level depression monitoring: a qualitative study.” (2016): 1-11.