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)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Online Support Groups for Family Caregivers: A Scoping Review
ABSTRACT
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 (OSGs) for family caregivers. Over the last decade the number of OSGs increased exponentially, however there is not consensus on what factors or characteristics of OSG contribute to the development of social support within these groups or what types of OSG are available to family caregivers. Following the Prisma-ScR guidelines, 19 studies were included in the review. The findings explore (a) the social support groups are online for adult family caregivers (b) the communication medium and characteristics of these OSGs and (c) the psychosocial or other factors that made OSG successful or unsuccessful for participants. The analysis process generated two overarching categories of safe communication and engagement 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. 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.