Social Media as an Emerging Data Resource for Epidemiologic Research: Characteristics of Regular and Nonregular Social Media Users in Nurses Health Study II.

With advances in natural language processing and machine learning, researchers are leveraging social media as a low-cost, low-burden method for measuring various psychosocial factors. However, it is unclear whether information derived from social media is generalizable to broader populations, especially middle-aged and older adults. Using data on women aged 53-70 years from Nurses Health Study II (2017-2018; n = 49,045), we assessed differences in sociodemographic characteristics, health conditions, behaviors, and psychosocial factors between regular and nonregular users of Facebook (Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, California). We evaluated effect sizes with phi (φ) coefficients (categorical data) or Cohens d (continuous data) and calculated odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals. While most comparisons between regular and nonregular users achieved statistical significance in this large sample, effect sizes were mostly very small (conventionally defined as φ or d