Health support groups, including those on the internet, can substantially benefit participants, but the social processes responsible for these benefits are unclear. A team of researchers led by Robert Kraut at Carnegie-Mellon University will explore how the conversational dynamics of online cancer support groups influence group functioning and participant quality of life and will develop computational tools that can be used to analyze online conversations and improve their effectiveness. The research project has four specific goals. (1) To understand how conversational episodes in online support groups facilitate social support. For example, what must a person say to get others to respond empathically? (2) To understand how support in these groups influences group commitment and affects health outcomes. (3) To develop computational tools to make the analysis of large datasets of health conversations tractable. (4) To use these tools to improve the training of support group facilitators.
Online health support groups are popular, being used by about 58% of American adults. Identifying the role of communication in online cancer support groups will provide valuable information to users and facilitators of these groups and will enhance their training. Moreover, a tool for analyzing large corpora of conversational data will facilitate the work of researchers who are interested in conversational behavior in other kinds of online groups
