Leveraging Social Media for Human Factors Research in Health Care

Abstract

There has been a significant increase in using social media for academic research and there is an opportunity for human factors professionals to incorporate these platforms into their research. Social media platforms provide a rich space to study extant data on health information communication, behaviors, and impacts and to recruit study participants. In this session, panelists will discuss using social media to study health-related topics including health management, gender-based violence, disaster response, self-harm, patient ergonomics, and secondary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. They will share how they have collected and analyzed data and recruited study participants from social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. They will also speak to the benefits and challenges of as well as ethical implications for using social media for research. There will be space for a moderated discussion to identify ways social media can be leveraged for human factors research in health care.