Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Levonian, Zachary, Zent, Matthew, Nguyen, Ngan, McNamara, Matthew, Terveen, Loren, Yarosh, Svetlana
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
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author Levonian, Zachary
Zent, Matthew
Nguyen, Ngan
McNamara, Matthew
Terveen, Loren
Yarosh, Svetlana
author_facet Levonian, Zachary
Zent, Matthew
Nguyen, Ngan
McNamara, Matthew
Terveen, Loren
Yarosh, Svetlana
contents Online health communities (OHCs) offer the promise of connecting with supportive peers. Forming these connections first requires finding relevant peers - a process that can be time-consuming. Peer recommendation systems are a computational approach to make finding peers easier during a health journey. By encouraging OHC users to alter their online social networks, peer recommendations could increase available support. But these benefits are hypothetical and based on mixed, observational evidence. To experimentally evaluate the effect of peer recommendations, we conceptualize these systems as health interventions designed to increase specific beneficial connection behaviors. In this paper, we designed a peer recommendation intervention to increase two behaviors: reading about peer experiences and interacting with peers. We conducted an initial feasibility assessment of this intervention by conducting a 12-week field study in which 79 users of CaringBridge received weekly peer recommendations via email. Our results support the usefulness and demand for peer recommendation and suggest benefits to evaluating larger peer recommendation interventions. Our contributions include practical guidance on the development and evaluation of peer recommendation interventions for OHCs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_04973
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment
Levonian, Zachary
Zent, Matthew
Nguyen, Ngan
McNamara, Matthew
Terveen, Loren
Yarosh, Svetlana
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
H.5.2; H.5.3; J.4
Online health communities (OHCs) offer the promise of connecting with supportive peers. Forming these connections first requires finding relevant peers - a process that can be time-consuming. Peer recommendation systems are a computational approach to make finding peers easier during a health journey. By encouraging OHC users to alter their online social networks, peer recommendations could increase available support. But these benefits are hypothetical and based on mixed, observational evidence. To experimentally evaluate the effect of peer recommendations, we conceptualize these systems as health interventions designed to increase specific beneficial connection behaviors. In this paper, we designed a peer recommendation intervention to increase two behaviors: reading about peer experiences and interacting with peers. We conducted an initial feasibility assessment of this intervention by conducting a 12-week field study in which 79 users of CaringBridge received weekly peer recommendations via email. Our results support the usefulness and demand for peer recommendation and suggest benefits to evaluating larger peer recommendation interventions. Our contributions include practical guidance on the development and evaluation of peer recommendation interventions for OHCs.
title Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
H.5.2; H.5.3; J.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04973