Abstract
To the Editor
As the elderly population in Australia increases, the number of Chinese-speaking Australians diagnosed with dementia is likewise projected to grow. Nevertheless, there are limited language-specific dementia educational programs for the older ethnic minorities in Australia. Previous research has shown that mental health education via YouTube could be a significant outreach tool for Chinese-speaking individuals residing in English-speaking countries (Lam et al., 2017). There is, however, little knowledge about the performance of popular social media in educating Chinese-speaking Australians about dementia. Here, we compare data from Year 1 (January 2014–January 2015) and Year 4 (January 2017–January 2018) in our study to assess the role of YouTube education videos related to dementia in delivering psychoeducation to Australian individuals who are fluent in Chinese.
The two 25-min YouTube videos were conducted entirely in Can-tonese. The first video covers general dementia knowledge (https://youtu.be/J8TMjPRWS_c), and the second video focuses on dementia diagnosis and prevention (https://youtu.be/7gT49EwWx5Q). The sample of this study included viewers who have watched the videos during the first 4-year period and was limited to only traffic sources from Australia. Para-meters such as watch time, average view duration (avd), number of views, age and gender of viewers, traffic sources and device types were recorded. Similar to other studies (Woo, 2017; Zheng and Woo, 2017), we decided to choose individuals entering the age group at risk for neurocognitive disorders, i.e., aged 45 years or above, as the target age group for delivering dementia knowledge.
During the 4-year period, the two videos were viewed 307 times, resulting in 2736 watched minutes. There were 123 (40.1%) male and 184 (59.9%) female viewers. Suggested videos by YouTube (n = 153) accounted for 49.8% of traffic source. 68.1% (n = 209) and 31.9% (n = 98) used tablets/mobile phones and computers to view the contents, respectively.
The targeted age group made up 60.9% (n = 56) and 71.2% (n = 153) of the total views for the dementia knowledge video and the dementia diagnosis/prevention video, respectively. The avd for both videos was 8.9 minutes. For the dementia diagnosis/prevention video, the targeted age group viewers had an avd of 9.3 minutes, which is 4.5% longer than the overall avd.
These findings suggest that YouTube videos were able to reach out to our targeted age group of Chinese-speaking Australians. The majority of viewers accessed the videos through mobile devices. The potential of YouTube in educating Chinese-speaking Australians is indeed promising.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
