Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Diabetes
Date Submitted: Jul 22, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 21, 2022 - Sep 15, 2022
Date Accepted: Nov 30, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Social Support in a Diabetes Online Community: A Mixed Methods Content Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Diabetes patients may experience different needs according to their diabetes stage. These needs may be met via online health communities (OHCs), where individuals seek health-related information and exchange different types of social support. Understanding what social support categories that may be more important for different diabetes stages may help diabetes online communities (DOCs) to provide more tailored support to online users.
Objective:
This study aimed to explore and quantify the categorical patterns of social support observed on a DOC, taking into consideration users’ different diabetes stages, including Prediabetes, Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), T2D with insulin treatment, and T2D remission.
Methods:
Data were collected from one of the largest DOC in Europe, Diabetes.co.uk. Drawing on a mixed methods content analysis, a qualitative content analysis was conducted to explore what social support categories could be identified in users’ posts. A total of 1841 posts were coded by five human annotators according to a modified version of the Social Support Behaviour Code (SSBC), including seven different social support categories: achievement, congratulations, network support, seeking emotional support, seeking informational support, providing emotional support, and providing informational support. Then, quantitative content analysis was conducted using chi-squared post hoc analysis to compare the most prominent social support categories across the different stages of diabetes.
Results:
Overall, seeking informational support (32.9%) and providing informational support (32.4%) were the most frequent categories exchanged among users. The overall distribution of social support categories was significantly different across diabetes stages (χ218=287.2; P<.001). Prediabetes users sought more informational support than other stages (P<.001), while there were no significant differences in categories posted by T2D users (P>.001). T2D insulin users provided more informational and emotional support (P<.001), and T2D remission users exchanged more achievement (P<.001) and network support (P<.001) than other stages.
Conclusions:
This is the first study that highlights what, how and when different types of social support may be beneficial for different stages of diabetes. These findings may provide novel insights to multiple stakeholders about how these categories can be strategically used and leveraged to support diabetes management.
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Copyright
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