Abstract
Background: It is critical for professionals to understand the discourse landscape within various online and social media outlets in order to support families of children with autism in treatment decision-making. This need is heightened when considering treatments that have garnered excitement and controversy, such as applied behavioral analysis (ABA) therapy.Method: The specific aims of this study were to identify the main themes in Reddit posts about ABA-based interventions for autism using topic modeling, to examine the linguistic aspects of Reddit conversations using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis, and to examine the relationship between linguistic aspects and user category (i.e., pro- vs. anti-ABA vs. undecided, parent vs. professional vs. an individual with autism).Results: The topic modeling resulted in 11 themes that ranged across various elements, such as autism as a condition and its management, stakeholders, and consequences of autism and the support needed. The posts of individuals were focused on personal experiences and opinions as opposed to clinical and research information sharing. Linguistic analysis indicated that the posts reveal an intimate stance rather than an empirical stance.Conclusions: Results provide insight into perspectives of ABA. This type of research may help in developing and distributing appropriate and evidence-based information.
Highlights
Families of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) must decide among varied types of management and intervention options to address symptoms associated with ASD, such as severe and sustained impairment in communication and social interaction and restricted patterns of ritualistic and stereotyped behaviors [1]
Conversations about applied behavioral analysis (ABA) in relation to ASD were extracted from Reddit
The median up-vote ratio was 0.9, and the median ups were seven suggesting that these posts were quite popular on the Reddit platforms
Summary
It is critical for professionals to understand the discourse landscape within various online and social media outlets in order to support families in treatment decision-making This need is heightened when considering treatments that have garnered excitement and controversy, such as interventions based on principles of applied behavioral analysis (ABA) [7]. It is critical for professionals to understand the discourse landscape within various online and social media outlets in order to support families of children with autism in treatment decision-making. This need is heightened when considering treatments that have garnered excitement and controversy, such as applied behavioral analysis (ABA) therapy
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