Social Media in Health

7. Facilitate Health-Related Research

Social media has a dual role in facilitating health-related research.

• First, it provides additional data about patients disease experiences by analyzing their conversations on social media, which ultimately leads to an enhanced understanding of patients experiences.
  
• Second, social media has the potential to recruit participants for health-related research as data shows that social media performs better than traditional methods in terms of recruitment, especially for hard-to-reach populations (e.g. immigrants) (Junhan & Wang, 2021).