With the high prevalence of autism spectrum disorders among the younger generation, there is a shortage of adequate resources to deliver care for these individuals. Therefore, social media and online forums help create a sense of community and a sense of social network, where members provide support for each other.

Assessing Social Support and Stress in Autism-Focused Virtual Communities: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical reference volume featuring the latest academic research on online communities and how using social media can provide stress relief for families and individuals diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Including coverage among a variety of applicable viewpoints and subjects such as social media concepts, stress relief, and healthcare communities, this book is ideally designed for academics and practitioners as well as healthcare professionals, researchers, students, academics, and practitioners looking for innovative research on autism spectrum disorders.

Coverage:

The many academic areas covered in this publication include, but are not limited to:

Autism Spectrum Disorders
Blogs
Healthcare Community
Online Communities
Online Forums
Social Media
Social Support Concepts
Stress Assessment
Stress Relief
Web 2.0

Table of Contents

Search this Book:

Reset

Editor/Author Biographies

Amit K Saha is an Assistant Professor, Clinical Data Scientist in the Department of Anesthesiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC. He is responsible to drive an optimal data architecture that efficiently and effectively presents an integrated view of clinical data for operational, financial and research processes. Also serving as a leader for data governance, best practices and optimal use of information to support the goals of the department. Supporting the research interests of faculty in the department. Previously he worked as Worked as the member of Center for Distance Health evaluation and analysis group at University of Arkansas Medical Sciences with the focus on achievement of key quality metrics to provide better patients care and outcome. His research interest includes Healthcare Informatics, Patient Care Data Management, Quality Improvement, natural language processing (NLP) and Social Computing. His long-term goal is to build a patient care experience research model using informatics approaches of data mining and predictive analytics methodology which will be of help for patient care decision support and help researchers answer key research questions. Electronic health records along with clinical data which includes both structured and unstructured text can be analyzed for knowledge and care improvement. By applying natural language processing (NLP), data standardization, mining, and analysis tools to various patient response data model can help in making better decisions in the planned patient care process. He along with his advisor Dr. Agarwal has examined various cyber campaigns such as Autism support groups’ efforts to debunk misinformation campaigns. The research has resulted in the best paper award at Fifth International Conference on Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics (SOTICS 2015), Barcelona, Spain and publication in other journal articles, and conference proceeding papers. Dr. Saha obtained Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with outstanding dissertation recognition.

Nitin Agarwal is the Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science at University of Arkansas-Little Rock. He is the director of the Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS). His research focuses on studying the role of socio-technical systems, especially social media, in conducting cyber campaigns. His research has examined various cyber campaigns such as Saudi Women’s efforts to raise awareness about the inequitable and gender-biased laws; Autism support groups’ efforts to debunk misinformation campaigns run by anti-vaxxers groups; anti-West, anti-NATO disinformation campaigns run by pro-Russian media and groups; and ISIS’ radicalization and recruitment campaigns. Supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Army Research Office (ARO), Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research is grounded in the social science theories of cyber collective action, social identity formation, resource mobilization, and social movement spillover and leverages concepts from computational sciences including machine learning, data mining, graph mining, social network analysis, content analysis, and natural language processing. The research has resulted in 5 books and over 100 peer-reviewed publications at various prestigious forums including journal articles, book chapters/encyclopedia entries, and conference proceeding papers. The research studies have resulted in Best Information System Publication of 2012 Award recognized by the AIS Senior Scholar Consortium, several Best Paper Awards and best paper nominees. Dr. Agarwal has developed Blogtrackers tool to analyze blogs to help identify key information actors, opinion leaders, leading narratives during information campaigns, and study how those narratives spread through myriad forms of social media. Dr. Agarwal is chairing the Socio-Cognitive Security Working Group under the auspices of the NSF South Big Data Hub. Dr. Agarwal collaborates with NATO’s Strategic Communications (STRATCOM) Center of Excellence to support their efforts to stem the tide of mis/disinformation and conduct training of social media analysis tools for them. Dr. Agarwal obtained Ph.D. from Arizona State University with outstanding dissertation recognition. He was recognized as one of 'The New Influentials: 20 In Their 20s' by Arkansas Business in 2011. He was recognized with the University-wide Faculty Excellence Award in Research and Creative Endeavors in 2015. Dr. Agarwal received the Social Media 2015 Educator of the Year Award at the 21st International Education and Technology Conference, Hong Kong SAR, China. He is an International Academy, Research and Industry Association (IARIA) Fellow. Visit http://ualr.edu/nxagarwal/ for more details.

Abstracting & Indexing

Archiving

All of IGI Global's content is archived via the CLOCKSS and LOCKSS initiative. Additionally, all IGI Global published content is available in IGI Global's InfoSci^® platform.