Exploring Social Ties in Informal Conversations about ASD and ADHD: A Graph-Based Approach

Studying society from a network perspective involves examining the relationships and interactions among individuals within a society. Informal conversations about medical issues especially in children's neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) can build a strong relationship that comes from a common problem. This study assesses the ability of novel graph-based approaches to explore how informal conversations about NDD in question-answering forums can create and grow a substantial dynamic of flows. After preparing and cleaning our dataset, called PerSNA, the network is built based on the questions and answers exchanged. The various features of graphs were extracted based on graph theory. The results indicated that although the number of nodes and edges in these networks is increasing quadratically, the networks are becoming islanded. The utilization of a graph-based analysis technique to examine informal discussions surrounding prevalent topics such as neurodevelopmental disorders represents a novel and promising approach for investigating community behaviors. This analytical method has the potential to facilitate our research efforts and offer a visual means for evaluating the data. Our study followed rigorous protocols to protect the privacy of participants during both data collection and analysis. Our dataset is private but codes are available at https://github.com/orgs/Persian-SNA/repositories