Educational Utility of Social Media for Laparoscopic Surgery in India: A Cross-Sectional Survey of Popular Indian Communities on Facebook [Response to Letter]

Dear editor

The authors appreciate the interest shown by Denise Tan in our recent research article on the educational utility of social media for laparoscopic surgery.¹ The correspondent has correctly pointed out the importance of newer learning approaches for postgraduate training in surgical specialties. Our article is the first one, to the best of our knowledge, to explore the learning potential of Facebook groups for laparoscopic surgery in India. Consequently, we were aware of all the potential limitations of our study which have been mentioned in the correspondent’s letter. We have already mentioned all these issues, as well as the potential disadvantages of social media for educational purposes, in the last two paragraphs of the Discussion section of our article.

The correspondent has proposed that the mental health of social media users and their increasing familiarity with online learning modes may be possible confounding factors. We employed a cross-sectional, non-interventional, non-comparative study design in our research. In the interests of privacy, all the collected data including the publicly available Facebook users data was coded or categorised to ensure anonymity. Hence, the above mentioned factors were not analysed. However, these novel ideas could certainly be investigated in future studies.