Yang Diyi, Yao Zheng, Seering Joseph, Kraut Robert
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
Proc SIGCHI Conf Hum Factor Comput Syst. 2019 May;2019. doi: 10.1145/3290605.3300261.
People with health concerns go to online health support groups to obtain help and advice. To do so, they frequently disclose personal details, many times in public. Although research in non-health settings suggests that people self-disclose less in public than in private, this pattern may not apply to health support groups where people want to get relevant help. Our work examines how the use of private and public channels influences members' self-disclosure in an online cancer support group, and how channels moderate the influence of self-disclosure on reciprocity and receiving support. By automatically measuring people's self-disclosure at scale, we found that members of cancer support groups revealed more negative self-disclosure in the public channels compared to the private channels. Although one's self-disclosure leads others to self-disclose and to provide support, these effects were generally stronger in the private channel. These channel effects probably occur because the public channels are the primary venue for support exchange, while the private channels are mainly used for follow-up conversations. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our work.
有健康问题的人会去在线健康支持小组寻求帮助和建议。为此，他们经常会公开透露个人细节，而且很多时候是在公共场合。尽管在非健康环境中的研究表明，人们在公共场合的自我表露比在私人场合少，但这种模式可能不适用于人们希望获得相关帮助的健康支持小组。我们的研究探讨了使用私人和公共渠道如何影响在线癌症支持小组中成员的自我表露，以及渠道如何调节自我表露对互惠和获得支持的影响。通过自动大规模测量人们的自我表露，我们发现癌症支持小组的成员在公共渠道中比在私人渠道中更多地进行负面自我表露。虽然一个人的自我表露会促使他人进行自我表露并提供支持，但这些影响在私人渠道中通常更强。这些渠道效应可能是因为公共渠道是支持交流的主要场所，而私人渠道主要用于后续对话。我们讨论了我们工作的理论和实际意义。
