Communicating Social Support in Online Self-help Groups for Anxiety and Depression: A Qualitative Discourse Analysis

Communicating Social Support in Online Self-help Groups for Anxiety and Depression: A Qualitative Discourse Analysis Abstract Research showed that the communication of social support in online self-help groups was therapeutic to participants. However, previous studies tended to focus on the content shared and have overlooked the communicative behaviors of the communication. Drawing upon the framework of discourse analysis, this study manifests the communicative patterns of the communication of social support in online self- help groups for anxiety and depression. It is argued that understanding communicative behaviors is beneficial for people to gauge the therapeutic effect of participation in the groups and to become integrated into the groups. 1 Introduction The advantages of computer-mediated communication, such as personal anonymity, boundary-free connections and time convenience (Fage-Bulter and Jensen, 2015), have increased the popularity of using online self-help groups to cope with emotional instability, particularly for people who have anxiety and depression. Online self-help groups (OSGs) refer to groups wherein people who share similar problems often related to health provide mutual support to one another (Ahmadi, 2017). Participants of OSGs can gain more communicative freedom (Mullany et al., 2016), distance from a sense of stigma (Weight and Bell, 2003), and actively express themselves with others (Kummervold et al., 2002). A wealth of research concluded that OSGs in health contexts are likely to be therapeutic for the users’ psychological conditions because of the interchange of social support among participants (Horgan et al., 2013; Mitchell, et al., 2013; Scherr and Reinemann, 2016). Social support was the key element that enhanced the therapeutic effects of the OSGs and the way users communicated with each other influenced the effects of the OSGs. It is significant to understand communicative behaviors of participants in the OSGs. However, reviewing previous literature, the author found that the communicative patterns of the OSGs were rarely explored. Informed by the framework of discourse analysis, this study investigates the communicative patterns of users in the OSGs for anxiety and depression. 2 Literature Review This section reviews the previous studies related to communication of OSGs in healthcare contexts, pointing out the research gap that much attention has been paid to the content of the communication of social support, whereas the communicative patterns are not examined sufficiently and systematically. 2.1 Social support in OSGs Previous studies related to social support in OSGs in health contexts tended to examine the content and overlook the communicative behaviors of the users. It was not difficult to find a large number of studies in the communication field which employed the content analysis method and the Social Support Behavior Code (Coulson, 2005), a coding scheme that categorizes social support to reveal the most predominant categories of social Jesse Wai Chi YIP Department of English Language and Literature Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong jesseyipwaichi@gmail.com PACLIC 32 807 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 by the author support in OSGs (e.g. Coulson, 2005; Couraris and Liu, 2009; Coulson and Greenwood, 2012; Prescott …

Content truncated to 500 words