Social media facilitates information exchange and is increasingly being used by scientists, health care professionals, and the public for communication, collaboration, information, and social support. Despite its increasing use, little is known about child health social media interaction.

Dr. Christine Chambers of the IWK Pediatric Pain Centre is inviting an MLIS student to work with her research team to assist in the exploration of social media interaction about pediatric pain and pediatric sleep.   Specific tasks would include identifying and categorizing the main themes in social media (YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook) related to pediatric pain and sleep, and describing user interactions with these themes across social media platforms.  Netlytic, a social listening program, will be used to identify the main themes, keywords, topics, and trends over time.

 This project will be conducted in the spring/summer of 2015 and could be undertaken either as a SIM directed reading class for academic credit or as a paid IWK summer student assistantship  (the deadline for submission of applications for IWK student assistantships is Feb. 12th: 

http://www.iwk.nshealth.ca/research/summer-studentship-program)  Note that a minimum GPA of 3.3 is needed if students wish to pursue the directed reading class option.

 

This project will be co-supervised by Christine Chambers and Vivian Howard.  If you are interested in this research opportunity, please send an expression of interest to Vivian Howard (vivian.howard@dal.ca) by January 12, 2015.