Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 2, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 28, 2023 - Apr 25, 2023
Date Accepted: Oct 18, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Online Support Groups for Family Caregivers: A Scoping Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Over the last decade the number of online support groups increased exponentially, however there is no consensus on what factors or characteristics of OSG contribute to the development of social support within these groups or what types of online support groups are available to family caregivers.
Objective:
The purpose of this present study was to conduct a scoping review to contribute to the understanding of the types and characteristics of online support groups for family caregivers.
Methods:
Following the Prisma-ScR guidelines, 19 studies were included in the review. The findings explore (a) the type of social support groups are online for adult family caregivers (b) the communication medium and characteristics of these online support groups and (c) the psychosocial or other factors that made the online support groups successful or unsuccessful for participants.
Results:
The analysis process generated two overarching categories of safe communication and engagement which described groups with a focus on similar others and shared life experience shared in a non-judgemental space overseen by trained peer or professional facilitators.
Conclusions:
A general recommendation for practitioners is that it appears important to build in active moderation and multi-faceted structures of support to meet different levels of caregiver needs and ability to engage.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.