Dementia is a significant health and fiscal problem for 7 million persons in the U. S. upon whom is spent at least 100 billion dollars a year in health care costs. Global estimates report that by the year 2000, there will be roughly 18 million people worldwide with dementia. The therapeutic role of traditional support groups for caregivers of persons with dementia has been well documented. Computer-mediated support groups (CMSGs) are an innovative yet relatively unexamined example of a support group therapeutic. The proposed study will increase substantive nursing knowledge in describing the CMSG phenomenon by illuminating the lived experiences of CMSG participation by caregivers of persons with dementia and measuring the concept of social presence as it occurs in computer-mediated communication (CMC). The proposed study will also provide a foundation for informing the use of CMSGs as a nursing therapeutic, advancing social presence studies, and future nursing research in CMC. Illuminating these concepts is significant to nursing because if interventions are continually assessed by traditional means, nursing may run the risk of overlooking a potentially valuable source of non-traditional interventions. The major qualitative focus informed by Husserlian phenomenology illuminates the lived experiences of CMSG participation and the minor quantitative component utilizes a 14 Likert item tool measuring the occurrence of social presence. The design was chosen because it offers a way of looking at CMSG participation through the personal experiences of the caregiver while the quantitative component begins to build a foundation to measure social presence in CMC.
