#DCD/Dyspraxia in Real Life: Twitter Users’ Unprompted Expression of Experiences With Motor Differences

Abstract

Little is known about adults’ experiences with developmental coordination disorder (DCD; sometimes also referred to as dyspraxia). Social media is an accessible opportunity for those who identify as dyspraxic or as having DCD to provide valuable insight into the lifespan impact of this condition on functional ability, participation, compensatory strategies, and well-being. We used the Twitter research application programming interface to identify users who self-identified with the keywords Developmental Coordination Disorder, #DCD, #dyspraxic (or # dyspraxia), or clumsy in their profile descriptions between October 10 and November 10, 2021. During that period, 818 tweets were harvested with 524 remaining after removing duplicates (e.g., multiple promotions of a single resource) and unrelated tweets. They were labeled according to motor differences (general motor, coordination, fine motor skills, oral motor skills, manual dexterity, driving, gross motor skills, movement pain and fatigue, posture and balance, and lower extremity); functional impact (advocacy/awareness, support for others, resources, information, and education, intervention, accommodation, and work); or other related topics (stimming and sensory, co-occurrence and diagnostic overlap, cognitive, social and communication speech, and emotional and mental health). The DCD/dyspraxic community has clearly identified a lifelong impact of motor differences across multiple contexts. DCD/dyspraxic Twitter users shared compensatory strategies that could help others, and offered insight into their experience of co-occurring conditions and cognitive/emotional sequelae of motor challenges.