Devangana Chatterjee
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Haylie Miller
Co-Presenter: Lichtenberg, Gavin
Research Mentor School/College/Department: University of Michigan / Kinesiology
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Oral5
Session: Session 1 – 10am – 10:50am
Room: Breakout room 2
Authors: Riya Chatterjee, Gavin Lichtenberg, Nicholas Fears, Haylie Miller
Presenter: 1
Abstract
The co-occurrence of autism and Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is not very well known and has not been properly studied. There is a critical need for community-informed research on this topic, particularly in the adult population, where motor problems in autism are not well-characterized. Social media, such as Twitter, offers a global opportunity for autistic adults with and without a co-occurring DCD diagnosis to share their experiences with motor problems. With these social media interactions, autistic adults provide valuable insight into the lifespan impact of motor problems on functional ability, participation, compensatory strategies, and overall well-being, as they share their personalized, unique experiences. We utilized Twitter’s Research API platform and implemented the Pandas Python library to collect 294,388 tweets containing terms related to autism (ex. #ASD, #autistic, #autism, etc.) and hashtags related to DCD (ex. #DCD, #dyspraxic, #dyspraxia, etc.). We identified 5,503 users who self-identified with terms related to autism, 78 users who self-identified with DCD, and 51 users who self-identified with both groups. To further examine the relationship between autism and motor development issues, we analyzed 171 additional tweets regarding motor problems from 31 autistic users replying to #AutChat, a weekly autistic Twitter discussion forum. We analyzed this subset of tweets to identify additional related terms for inclusion in the final search. Finally, we reviewed tweet contents to extract themes, assess the frequency with which certain problems were discussed, and differentiated childhood from adulthood experiences to identify changes over a lifespan. Results are discussed in the context of the lifespan impact of motor problems on activities of daily living, and with respect to the presence or absence of a DCD diagnosis. This new knowledge serves as a starting point for understanding the domains of life affected by motor problems across development in autism.
Biomedical Sciences, Interdisciplinary
