Social media for palliative and end-of-life care research: a systematic review

Yijun Wang · Jonathan Koffman · Wei Gao · Yuxin Zhou · Emeka Chukwusa · Vasa Ćurčin

10 citations0/0 files storedBMJ Supportive & Palliative Care

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Social Media in Health Education Palliative Care and End-of-Life Issues Palliative and Oncologic Care

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Social media with real-time content and a wide-reaching user network opens up more possibilities for palliative and end-of-life care (PEoLC) researchers who have begun to embrace it as a complementary research tool. This review aims to identify the uses of social media in PEoLC studies and to examine the ethical considerations and data collection approaches raised by this research approach. METHODS: Nine online databases were searched for PEoLC research using social media published before December 2022. Thematic analysis and narrative synthesis approach were used to categorise social media applications. RESULTS: 21 studies were included. 16 studies used social media to conduct secondary analysis and five studies used social media as a platform for information sharing. Ethical considerations relevant to social media studies varied while 15 studies discussed ethical considerations, only 6 studies obtained ethical approval and 5 studies confirmed participant consent. Among studies that used social media data, most of them manually collected social media data, and other studies relied on Twitter application programming interface or third-party analytical tools. A total of 1 520 329 posts, 325 videos and 33 articles related to PEoLC from 2008 to 2022 were collected and analysed. CONCLUSIONS: Social media has emerged as a promising complementary research tool with demonstrated feasibility in various applications. However, we identified the absence of standardised ethical handling and data collection approaches which pose an ongoing challenge. We provided practical recommendations to bridge these pressing gaps for researchers wishing to use social media in future PEoLC-related studies.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

References

2009Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media 2021The PRISMA 2020 statement: An updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews 2008Methods for the thematic synthesis of qualitative research in systematic reviews 2013A New Dimension of Health Care: Systematic Review of the Uses, Benefits, and Limitations of Social Media for Health Communication 2004Standard Quality Assessment Criteria for Evaluating Primary Research Papers from a Variety of Fields 2016Social media use in healthcare: A systematic review of effects on patients and on their relationship with healthcare professionals 2017Social media analytics – Challenges in topic discovery, data collection, and data preparation 2020Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.