A comparative examination of social perception, network structure, important nodes, and discourses regarding ASD awareness over online networks: A social network and content analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine activities carried out on Twitter, which is a social media platform, on April 2 Autism Awareness Day; network structure in Turkey and in a global context, interaction patterns, the important nodes, user profiles, hashtag usage, and social mode within the context of the Twitter messages and discourses. In the research, mixed research method was adopted, and social network analysis and content analysis methods were used. The sample constitutes a total of 16565 people with 2790 people from Turkey and 13775 people from all over the world. According to the findings in the sample and Turkey as well as the global clustered-community group structures has been observed that the structure of the network. When compared with global examples of effective institutions related to the ASD in Turkey in the global context, the process of institutions and corporate entities has been determined to be more effective. It is seen that especially famous people who are known in the global context are involved in the process in order to reach more audiences. It is found that hashtag use in Turkey is limited, for example, on the other hand, in a global context hashtag use is more diverse to reach different target groups Comparative concept maps revealed that fewer themes were issued in Turkey while there was a wide range of themes in the global context. Social mode is positive in both samples.

Keywords

• Autism spectrum disorder
• awareness
• online social networks
• social network analysis
• content analysis

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