Other publication
Smoking cessation through online health communities: A social support perspective
Authors: Chenglong Li
Editors: Hongxiu Li, Reima Suomi, Ágústa Pálsdóttir, Roland Trill, Hamed Ahmadinia
Conference name: International Conference on Well-Being in the Information Society
Publisher: Turku Centre for Computer Science
Publishing place: Turku
Publication year: 2018
Book title : Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Well-Being in the Information Society: Fighting Inequalities (WIS 2018)
Series title: TUCS Lecture Notes
Number in series: 28
First page : 45
Last page: 50
ISBN: 978-952-12-3727-0
ISSN: 1797-8831
Web address : http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-3727-0
Self-archived copy’s web address: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-3727-0
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.
Downloadable publication This is an electronic reprint of the original article. |