Exploring Self-Identified Counseling Expertise in Online Support Forums

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lahnala, Allison, Zhao, Yuntian, Welch, Charles, Kummerfeld, Jonathan K., An, Lawrence, Resnicow, Kenneth, Mihalcea, Rada, Pérez-Rosas, Verónica
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2021
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author Lahnala, Allison
Zhao, Yuntian
Welch, Charles
Kummerfeld, Jonathan K.
An, Lawrence
Resnicow, Kenneth
Mihalcea, Rada
Pérez-Rosas, Verónica
author_facet Lahnala, Allison
Zhao, Yuntian
Welch, Charles
Kummerfeld, Jonathan K.
An, Lawrence
Resnicow, Kenneth
Mihalcea, Rada
Pérez-Rosas, Verónica
contents A growing number of people engage in online health forums, making it important to understand the quality of the advice they receive. In this paper, we explore the role of expertise in responses provided to help-seeking posts regarding mental health. We study the differences between (1) interactions with peers; and (2) interactions with self-identified mental health professionals. First, we show that a classifier can distinguish between these two groups, indicating that their language use does in fact differ. To understand this difference, we perform several analyses addressing engagement aspects, including whether their comments engage the support-seeker further as well as linguistic aspects, such as dominant language and linguistic style matching. Our work contributes toward the developing efforts of understanding how health experts engage with health information- and support-seekers in social networks. More broadly, it is a step toward a deeper understanding of the styles of interactions that cultivate supportive engagement in online communities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2106_12976
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Self-Identified Counseling Expertise in Online Support Forums
Lahnala, Allison
Zhao, Yuntian
Welch, Charles
Kummerfeld, Jonathan K.
An, Lawrence
Resnicow, Kenneth
Mihalcea, Rada
Pérez-Rosas, Verónica
Computation and Language
A growing number of people engage in online health forums, making it important to understand the quality of the advice they receive. In this paper, we explore the role of expertise in responses provided to help-seeking posts regarding mental health. We study the differences between (1) interactions with peers; and (2) interactions with self-identified mental health professionals. First, we show that a classifier can distinguish between these two groups, indicating that their language use does in fact differ. To understand this difference, we perform several analyses addressing engagement aspects, including whether their comments engage the support-seeker further as well as linguistic aspects, such as dominant language and linguistic style matching. Our work contributes toward the developing efforts of understanding how health experts engage with health information- and support-seekers in social networks. More broadly, it is a step toward a deeper understanding of the styles of interactions that cultivate supportive engagement in online communities.
title Exploring Self-Identified Counseling Expertise in Online Support Forums
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12976