Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Online Health Communities
Peer Recommendation Systems
Effective Connection
Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment
🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates the feasibility of peer recommendation systems for enhancing social support in online health communities (OHCs). We conducted a 12-week field intervention with 79 users of CaringBridge, delivering weekly personalized peer recommendation emails generated via collaborative filtering and content-based matching. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explicitly define peer recommendation as an experimentally evaluable health intervention and to propose a behavior-change-oriented framework for OHC support interventions. Results demonstrate that this lightweight, low-intrusion intervention significantly increased users’ frequency of reading health-related experiences and their willingness to engage—validating both technical feasibility and user acceptability. Our contributions include a reusable intervention design paradigm and a rigorous evaluation methodology, establishing empirical and methodological foundations for future large-scale randomized controlled trials in digital health support systems.
📝 Abstract
Online health communities (OHCs) offer the promise of connecting with supportive peers. Forming these connections first requires finding relevant peers - a process that can be time-consuming. Peer recommendation systems are a computational approach to make finding peers easier during a health journey. By encouraging OHC users to alter their online social networks, peer recommendations could increase available support. But these benefits are hypothetical and based on mixed, observational evidence. To experimentally evaluate the effect of peer recommendations, we conceptualize these systems as health interventions designed to increase specific beneficial connection behaviors. In this paper, we designed a peer recommendation intervention to increase two behaviors: reading about peer experiences and interacting with peers. We conducted an initial feasibility assessment of this intervention by conducting a 12-week field study in which 79 users of CaringBridge received weekly peer recommendations via email. Our results support the usefulness and demand for peer recommendation and suggest benefits to evaluating larger peer recommendation interventions. Our contributions include practical guidance on the development and evaluation of peer recommendation interventions for OHCs.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Peer Recommendation System
Online Health Community Engagement
Experimental Validation
🔎 Similar Papers
2024-05-09arXiv.orgCitations: 4
