Investigating Support Seeking from Peers for Pregnancy in Online Health Communities

Abstract

We report a study of peer support in online health communities for pregnancy care along three gestational stages (trimesters) to investigate how pregnant women seek and receive peer support during different stages of pregnancy. Using Babycenter.com as our research setting, we found that pregnant women sought peer support due to constrained access to healthcare providers, dissatisfaction with healthcare services/medical advice, limited offline social support, and unavailability of information in other venues. While the particular topics of concern typifying each trimester were distinct, pregnant women consistently sought advice, informal and formal knowledge, reassurance, and emotional support from peers during each stage of pregnancy. BabyCenter.com peers provided support by leveraging their own experiential knowledge and passing along clinical expertise acquired during the course of their own healthcare. We discuss design implications for health services and IT systems that meet pregnant women's temporal and multi-faceted needs during prenatal care.

Pregnancy and health in the age of the Internet: A content analysis of online “birth club” forums

“…Aside from the topic relating to childbirth, which is analogous to our "labor" topic, the remaining topics either did not arise in our findings (i.e, fetal development) or were not dominant in specific trimesters. The topics found in our study, however, are largely similar to those from Gui et al (2017), who analyzed trimester-specific forums on BabyCenter.com, and overlap to some extent with a study examining pregnant women's search queries [28].…”

“…The sheer amount of data on these pregnancy forums offers a unique, untapped opportunity to examine how women seek online information from a community of peers during pregnancy. To our knowledge, the only prior general empirical study on these forums was conducted by Gui et al (2017), who examined 200 online posts in each of three trimester-specific BabyCenter.com forums, utilizing a grounded theory research design [29]. Gui et al (2017) found that women sought advice, informal and formal knowledge, reassurance, and emotional support; they also identified specific topics of support-seeking across the three trimesters.…”

“…[27] Based on publicly available data from WhatToExpect.com and BabyCenter.com, we estimate that there are currently over one million total posts (initial posts + replies) for each birth club forum (i.e., for each due date month and year, such as April 2019) across these two websites. Though the grounded theory approach utilized by Gui et al (2017) offered researchers deep immersion in the data, it would be infeasible to manually code the hundreds of thousands of posts that comprise each birth club forum. Automatic and semi-automatic methods of analysis are thus required to utilize the data at scale.…”

“…The present study aims to apply automatic methods of language analysis (specifically, Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling) to a much larger collection of birth club forum postings than what was used by Gui et al (2017), in order to better understand the kinds of online information that women seek from their peers during pregnancy. We sought to discover whether women discuss health-related topics, and if so, which topics appeared most frequently.…”

Engagement with Mental Health Screening on Mobile Devices

“…The majority of these technologies have been designed to communicate healthrelated information to parents [86]. HCI researchers have developed prototype applications for Dutch (Babywijzer), Pakistani (Baby+), and Vietnamese Australian (We-HELP) populations [70,78,92], deployed SMS-based systems for personalised health information communication in Kenya and Pakistan [8,63] and conducted qualitative analyses of pregnant women's motivations for information sharing and support seeking online [29,43,65]. Peyton et al propose a 'pregnancy ecology,' comprising physical, emotional, informational and social supports, to support the design of physical health interventions [64], which Prabhakar et al extend to include support needs, sources, and interventions within an Evolving Ecology of Support [66].…”