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Smoking cessation through online health communities: A social support perspective




AuthorsChenglong Li

EditorsHongxiu Li, Reima Suomi, Ágústa Pálsdóttir, Roland Trill, Hamed Ahmadinia

Conference nameInternational Conference on Well-Being in the Information Society

PublisherTurku Centre for Computer Science

Publishing placeTurku

Publication year2018

Book title Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Well-Being in the Information Society: Fighting Inequalities (WIS 2018)

Series titleTUCS Lecture Notes

Number in series28

First page 45

Last page50

ISBN978-952-12-3727-0

ISSN1797-8831

Web address http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-3727-0

Self-archived copy’s web addresshttp://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-3727-0


Abstract

Online health communities have been argued to play an important role in smoking quitting and maintenance from the social support perspective. But little is known about the character of online social support among Chinese smokers in online health communities. This study aims to explore what social support Chinese smokers share via online health communities. The data in a Chinese online community called Baidu Quitting Smoking Bar were crawled via pro-gramming. The content analysis was employed to analyze the content of messages. A pilot study was conducted to identify the classification of social support. Two threads with corresponding messages (N=835) were randomly selected and categorized based on the social support behavior code (SSBC). Findings shown that emotional support is the most widespread, following informational support, network and esteem support, while tangible support is rare. Surprisingly, self-disclosure is common in this online community. These messages only record smokers’ cessation progress or personal accomplishment without seeking social support. Further study will be conducted based on this pilot study to identify so-cial support for smoking cessation in online communities with the full data collected.


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