Twitter Patterns of Attendings versus Trainees: Insight about the Social Media Patterns from the Annual Vascular Meeting
Dongjin Suh, BS, Jeanine Guidry, PhD, Michael Amendola, MD.
VA Medical Center/VCU Health System, Richmond, VA, USA.
BACKGROUND:
Twitter is a social-networking service that uses tweets to capture social events. Participants of the Society of Vascular Surgery Vascular Annual Meeting (VAM) often use Twitter to expand their professional network and share their interests. We hypothesize a continuum between attending physicians and trainees in vascular surgery using Twitter at this meeting.
METHODS:
Twitter posts with “#VAM17” and “#VAM18” where collected and analyzed 30 days prior and after VAM. Tweets sources (academic, official vascular society and/or publication and official vascular company) were collected. All tweets were broken down into two posting groups: those from attending physicians and those from trainees (medical students, residents and fellows). Items analyzed include gender of the posting, if an image was associated, like frequency, retweet frequency and if a procedure was mentioned. Fisher’s Exact** and students t-test* were utilized.
RESULTS:
A 458 Tweets were found with 25 tweets (5.4%) from an official vascular organization. A 104 involved a vascular procedure. 16.5% and 5.5% of tweets were from academic institutions and vascular companies respectively. A total of 172 (37.5%) Tweets were connected to an attending or trainee. 8.8% of the attendings tweeters had content of a female subject compared to 22.3% trainee tweeters (p=0.02**). Attendings tweeted about other attendings significantly less at 52.6% of the time compared to trainees who tweeted about other trainees 82.8% of the time (p=0.0006**).
| Attendings Tweeters n=78 | Trainee Tweeters n=94 | p value | |
| Male Gender Subject Matter (%) | 86.3% | 50.6% | 0.0001** |
| Like Frequency (mean ± SD) | 10.7 ± 6.7 | 6.2 ± 4.9 | 0.0001* |
| Reply to Tweet (mean ± SD) | 0.34 ± 0.6 | 0.14 ± 0.35 | 0.006* |
| Retweet (mean ± SD) | 2.7 ± 2.1 | 3.2 ± 2.3 | 0.18 |
There was no significant difference in terms of if an image was associated (84% v. 72.2%; p=0.06**) and if a procedure was mentioned (24% v. 34%; p=0.18**) between the attending and trainee groups respectively.
CONCLUSIONS:
Analysis of Twitter activity centered around #VAM shows trainees seem to be more active in describing fellow trainees with more of their post were centered around female subjects. Trainees seemed to tweet more about themselves than attending tweeters and when they do so, they were more balanced in terms of the gender of their subjects. These data should inform a potential need for attending surgeons to engage their trainees with this social media platform and reveals a potential bias in expression as it relates to gender.
Back to 2019 ePosters