Digital-Enabled Human-Information Interaction

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https://hdl.handle.net/10125/79234

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    How an Online Health Support Community Responded to the COVID-19 Crisis
    (2022-01-04) Knittel, Megan; Wash, Rick
    The scope and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges for people seeking health information online. To understand how an existing online community of people living with a chronic health condition navigate meeting their existing health goals alongside the challenges and tensions resulting from COVID-19, we performed a qualitative content analysis of six weeks of discussion in the \rinfertility online community. We found that community members collaborated and debated to make dynamic structural and normative changes to their community in accordance with the changing impacts of COVID-19 on their experiences. Additionally, we found that community members information-seeking goals were centered around timelines for their own treatment plans and goals, with the scope of these timelines shifting based on their current state of knowledge of COVID-19. Implications of these findings for supporting health online communities broadly are discussed.
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    Coping and Regulatory Responses on Social Media during Health Crisis: a Large-scale Analysis
    (2022-01-04) Abramova, Olga; Batzel, Katharina; Modesti, Daniela
    During a crisis event, social media enables two-way communication and many-to-many information broadcasting, browsing others’ posts, publishing own content, and public commenting. These records can deliver valuable insights to approach problematic situations effectively. Our study explores how social media communication can be analyzed to understand the responses to health crises better. Results based on nearly 800 K tweets indicate that the coping and regulation foci framework holds good explanatory power, with four clusters salient in public reactions: 1) “Understanding” (problem-promotion); 2) “Action planning” (problem-prevention); 3) “Hope” (emotion-promotion) and 4) “Reassurance” (emotion-prevention). Second, the inter-temporal analysis shows high volatility of topic proportions and a shift from self-centered to community-centered topics during the course of the event. The insights are beneficial for research on crisis management and practicians who are interested in large-scale monitoring of their audience for well-informed decision-making.
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