Leveraging Social Capital of Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities through Participation on Facebook

Abstract

Participation in social networking sites may also leverage bridging social capital of persons with intellectual disabilities, but they need a more accessible platform and ongoing support to ensure safe and fruitful participation.

Facilitating Social Connectedness for People with Autism and Intellectual Disability Using an Interactive App

“…Recent appraisals of ATCs [de la Guia et al, 2015;Shpigelman, 2016;Caton & Chapman, 2016) highlight that most have been developed for the general public in the form of calendars, reminder services and to-do lists. Consequently, there is a need to tailor ATCs to help people with cognitive disabilities.…”

Privacy Attitudes and Behaviours of Autistic and Non-Autistic Teenagers on Social Networking Sites

“…Silva et al [99] conducted a heuristic evaluation of the usability of privacy settings on Facebook for young people. They found severe violations of 4 of the 10 usability heuristics proposed by Nielsen [74], namely the match between the system and the real world (H2); consistency and standards (H4); recognition rather than recall (H7); and help and documentation (H10 intellectual disabilities, who struggle to "re-learn" how to use the site following design changes [96,98]. These types of updates may make it difficult for autistic teenagers to keep track of the location of privacy tools on SNS.…”

“…One of the main obstacles that people with intellectual disabilities face with using SNS is learning the terminology and social conventions of the platforms. Indeed, Shpigelman [96] found that the terms "timeline", "tag", "share", and "personal settings" were not intuitive for adults with intellectual disabilities. It is possible autistic users may have a different understanding of privacy-related terms (e.g., "privacy", "block", "report") on SNS than their typically developing peers.…”

“…Specialized assistive technologies may be stigmatizing for users with cognitive disabilities [86], who have the desire and right to benefit from equivalent services to those used by the general population. Indeed, a psychological benefit of social media use by users with intellectual disabilities -including those with autism -is the sense of pride and inclusion that comes along with being able to use SNS like Facebook just like everybody else [96]. Therefore, the focus of future research and initiatives should be to make SNS as accessible and inclusive as possible for users with a wide range of cognitive capabilities.…”

“…In turn, most autistic teenagers are at an extreme disadvantage in terms of developing a satisfying social life online compared to non-autistic users.Autistic teenagers' social engagement online is further impaired by design elements of SNS. This barrier not only relates to complex language conventions of mainstream communication platforms -as discussed in previous research[43,96,103] -but also the social values and norms encouraged by the sites. SNS cater to non-autistic users' social values, such as increasing social capital, enhancing social status, as well as receiving attention and approval.…”