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To stay or leave?: the relationship of emotional and informational support to commitment in online health support groups

Authors:

John M. LevineAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Pages 833 - 842

https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145329

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Today many people with serious diseases use online support groups to seek social support. For these groups to be sustained and effective, member retention and commitment is important. Our study examined how different types and amounts of social support in an online cancer support group are associated with participants' length of membership. We first built machine learning models to automatically identify the extent to which messages contained emotional and informational support. Agreement with human judges was high (r > 0.76). We then used these models to measure the support exchanged in 1.5 million messages. Finally, we applied quantitative event history analysis to assess how exposure to emotional and informational support predicted group members' length of subsequent participation. The results demonstrated that the more emotional support members were exposed to, the lower the risk of dropout. In contrast, informational support did not have the same strong effects on commitment. We speculate that emotional support enhanced members' relationships with one another or the group as a whole, whereas informational support satisfied members' short-term information needs.

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Cited By

Jozani MWilliams JAleroud ABhagat S(2025)Emotional and Informational Dynamics in Question-Response Pairs in Online Health Communities: A Multimodal Deep Learning ApproachInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-024-10566-yOnline publication date: 3-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-024-10566-y
Hayes OEl Baou CHardy CCamic PBrotherhood EHarding ECrutch S(2024)How Do Care Partners of People with Rare Dementia Use Language in Online Peer Support Groups? A Quantitative Text Analysis StudyHealthcare10.3390/healthcare1203031312:3(313)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12030313
Wu MYan JQiao CYan C(2024)Impact of Concurrent Media Exposure on Professional Identity: Cross-Sectional Study of 1087 Medical Students During Long COVIDJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/5005726(e50057)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/50057
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Index Terms

To stay or leave?: the relationship of emotional and informational support to commitment in online health support groups
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
  2. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Interaction paradigms
      1. Web-based interaction
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing and business
      1. Computer supported cooperative work

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

February 2012

1460 pages

ISBN:9781450310864

DOI:10.1145/2145204

General Chairs:
Steven Poltrock
Boeing Research & Technology
,
Carla Simone
University of Milano-Biccoca
,
Program Chairs:
Jonathan Grudin
Microsoft Research
,
Gloria Mark
University of California, Irvine
,
John Riedl
University of Minnesota

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 February 2012

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CSCW '12: Computer Supported Cooperative Work

February 11 - 15, 2012

Washington, Seattle, USA

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CSCW '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 415 submissions, 40%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Jozani MWilliams JAleroud ABhagat S(2025)Emotional and Informational Dynamics in Question-Response Pairs in Online Health Communities: A Multimodal Deep Learning ApproachInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-024-10566-yOnline publication date: 3-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-024-10566-y
Hayes OEl Baou CHardy CCamic PBrotherhood EHarding ECrutch S(2024)How Do Care Partners of People with Rare Dementia Use Language in Online Peer Support Groups? A Quantitative Text Analysis StudyHealthcare10.3390/healthcare1203031312:3(313)Online publication date: 25-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12030313
Wu MYan JQiao CYan C(2024)Impact of Concurrent Media Exposure on Professional Identity: Cross-Sectional Study of 1087 Medical Students During Long COVIDJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/5005726(e50057)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/50057
Zhao JZhu DChang FHan T(2024)Rehab-Diary: Enhancing Recovery Identity with an Online Support Group for Middle Aged and Older Ovarian Cancer PatientsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765208:MHCI(1-25)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676520
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Wang XZuo ZTong XZhu Y(2024)Talk more about yourself: a data-driven extended theory of reasoned action for online health communitiesInformation Technology and Management10.1007/s10799-022-00376-625:3(233-246)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
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