Video-mediated peer support in an online community for recovery from substance use disorders

Sabirat Rubya, Svetlana Yarosh

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

55 Scopus citations

Abstract

People in recovery from substance use disorders seek peer support through online health communities like InThe-Rooms.com (ITR). This community provides the unique opportunity to study video-mediated health peer support online, as it hosts over 100 weekly video meetings for fellowships like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). We describe two synergistic investigations of participants' use, perceptions, and tensions around video meetings on ITR: an online questionnaire, and in-depth interviews with active site members. We discuss four themes that may be important to other peer-support health communities: opportunities for video-mediated support, synergy with face-to-face contact, challenge of transparency of norms, and the importance of constructive moderation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1454-1469
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781450343350
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 25 2017
Event2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017 - Portland, United States
Duration: Feb 25 2017Mar 1 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

Other2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period2/25/173/1/17

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Angela Yu, Sahithi Asireddy and Thanh-Mai Phan for helping us in scraping public data from ITR.com and for developing the questionnaire. We would also like to acknowledge the leadership of ITR.com, and our survey and interview participants who shared their time and experience with us. This work was funded by the NSF grant (1464376).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 ACM.

Keywords

  • Online health community
  • Peer support
  • Recovery
  • Twelvestep fellowship
  • Video-mediated communication

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