Newswise — COLUMBUS, Ohio – An analysis of what foster families talk about on social media showed how the COVID-19 pandemic ramped up their anxieties and concerns about the children in their care.
Researchers compared what foster families talked about online in the months prior to the pandemic to their discussions immediately following lockdowns.
Findings showed that online discussions on some topics changed dramatically, said Joyce Lee, lead author of the study and assistant professor of social work at The Ohio State University.
“Foster families were faced with multiple challenges during the early months of COVID-19 and they turned to social media to express their concerns and needs,” Lee said.
“They were especially worried about delays in their attempts to get licensed as foster parents, the permanency plans for children in their care, and what kind of activities they could do to occupy their children during lockdown.”
Lee, who did the work as a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, conducted the study with Olivia Chang of the University of Michigan and Tawfiq Ammari of Rutgers University. The study was published online recently in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect.
The researchers used a relatively new method to study the concerns of foster parents. They collected more than 11,000 comments that users of the social media platform Reddit made on three subreddits, or online discussion boards, dedicated to foster families.
They used machine learning techniques to...
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