Event Abstract Back to Event The internet and the social media as a source of information and support in aphasia Eugenia P. Kouki1*, Mary H. Kosmidis1 and Hariklia Proios2 1 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of Psychology, Greece 2 University of Macedonia, Department of Educational & Social Policy, Greece The majority of healthcare professionals use social media for professional purposes (Dooley, Jones, & Iverson, 2014), and Facebook has been reported as the most popular online social network (Anderson & Guyton, 2013). Researchers have suggested that an available online account may improve physicians’ communication with their patients, and help them be more accessible and useful to the latter (Hawn, 2009). When cautiously used, social media can augment the clinician’s service provision and the patient-doctor relationship (Spence, Lachlan, Westerman, & Spates, 2013). Also, research has shown that women use social media more than men in order to search for health information (Al Ghamdi & Moussa, 2012) and that they benefit significantly more than men from Internet-based interventions (Fotiadou, Northcott, Chatzidaki, & Hilari, 2014; Lieberman, 2003). A particular clinical group of women, namely, those with aphasia, are known to lack the proper social support, despite increased need for timely and accessible information and support regarding their condition (Fotiadou et al., 2014). We therefore examined perceptions of health-care and non-health-care users of social media as related to an aphasia-related website, and a corresponding Facebook page. We expected that viewers’ evaluation of the website and the Facebook page would be affected by gender and occupation, with women and healthcare professionals seeking knowledge about aphasia scoring higher in the following items within a 19-item questionnaire: future visits to the pages, perceived usefulness of the information in the pages, and preference over other sources. As seen in Table 1, women had higher scores than men in perceived usefulness of the website information (item 10); t(168)=-2.89, p<0.01, (but not of the Facebook page information (item 11); t(167)=1.054), in future visits of the website and the Facebook page (item 14, and item 15); t(168)=-3.06, p<0.01, and t(166)=-2.85, p<0.01 correspondingly, and preference of the website (item 16); t(168)=-3.66, p<0.01, (but not of the Facebook page (item 17); t(164)=1.987). Table 2 demonstrates that healthcare professionals scored higher than non-healthcare professionals in perceived usefulness of the website information (item 10); t(168)=2.26, p<0.05 (but not of the Facebook page information; t(167)=-1.542), in future visits of the website and the Facebook page (item 14, and item 15); t(168)=3.22, p<0.01, and t(166)=3.25, p<0.01 correspondingly, and in preference of the website and the Facebook page over other sources (item 16, and item 17); t(168)=2.54, p<0.01, and t(164)=1.98, p<0.05. However, no interaction between gender and occupation was found. This implies that being a woman and a healthcare professional does not affect their evaluation of the pages more than being a man and a healthcare professional. We concluded that both female and male viewers overall valued the content of both pages. This work demonstrates the need for more structured and methodological comparisons on the usefulness of social media and websites related to aphasia. Figure 1 Figure 2 Acknowledgements We thank the members of Thessaloniki Aphasia Team, who participated in the development of the website and the Facebook page.