The Difficulties and Hardships of People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Computational Text-Analysis Study of US Newspaper Coverage

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a far-reaching influence on various facets of American society. People who live with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are particularly vulnerable to social isolation, health disparity, and economic hardship. Due to their communication challenges, people with IDD lack effective and accessible ways to express their affected experiences and hardships. Much remains un known about their specific difficulties and challenges during this pandemic, hindering stakeholders from improving quality of life among people with IDD and hindering efforts to improve pertinent services. Available data from newspaper coverage may provide opportunities to explore these issues. This study uses archived newspaper data to explore identified covid-related difficulties and hardships among people with IDD.

Methods: The primary data used in this study consists of all related news published in the New York Times and Washington Post from Jan 31, 2020 to the present. We use official APIs to collect the news by searching a list of keywords pertinent to IDD. We then conduct basic preprocessing data cleaning, and create the text-data corpus for the analysis. The unit of observation is one single document (i.e., a piece of published news) with a unique id. The final sample includes 1,808 documents: 872 from the New York Times, and 936 from the Washington Post.

Use Structural Topic Modelling (STM), Keywords Assisted Topic Models (K-ATM), and basic text analysis architecture to discover the latent prevalence of topics among all documents. STM provides the unsupervised-learned and clustered topics discussed by these two newspapers during the pandemic. K-ATM offers the frequency of keywords under each topic.

Results: The pandemic hindered access to professional therapy, special education, medical support, childcare, and affordable social services for people with IDD. Media reports underscored the difficulty of coping with the pandemic without such crucial services. Caregiver depression and suicide were also prominently reported by the media. The interactions between people with IDD and law enforcement take up the largest portion of all topics. They experienced more difficulties in interacting with the police and juridical system as well.

Implications: Contingency plans should accommodate emergency situations for people with IDD to maintain accessible essential services. Explore new online-hybrid models to improve service coverage and accessibility. The mental health status of caregivers requires more attention. Necessary crisis intervention programs ought to be developed to assist caregivers at-risk of depression or suicide. The law enforcement and judicial system should be educated about how to interact with people who live with IDD to protect their legitimate rights.