Scaffolding the Online Peer-support Experience: Novice Supporters' Strategies and Challenges

Abstract

People with mental distress are increasingly turning to one-to-one synchronous communication websites to receive peer support from other members. Though some research has identified benefits and challenges of online peer-support, there is a limited understanding of how to best prepare and scaffold for untrained peer supporters as they attempt to become skillful in an online setting. We recruited 30 (15 pairs) participants to engage in an online support conversation about procrastination problems, gave one member of each pair minimal training in the principles and strategies of motivational interviewing, and used interviews and conversation transcripts to examine challenges novice helpers faced when providing support and learning new conversational skills. We presented the helpers with two conversation goals to achieve with the conversation: building understanding, and promoting readiness for change. The research identified the common strategies the helpers used to achieve these goals and the challenges they faced. We also discuss theoretical and design implications for platform designers to better scaffold this experience.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; • Applied computing → Psychology.

Perceived challenges affecting user engagement in online community: an analysis of interrelationships and interaction

“…2.2.5 Sense of trust. The most essential challenge online communities face is the basic trust issue (Chen et al, 2021). For meaningful, continuing contact to occur, users must be able to trust one another.…”

“…2.2.15 Lack of strategic planning, outdated contents and uninspired discussions. 70% of online communities are destined to fail because of lack of strategic planning and outdated content and discussion that are off beats like updating of feedback of customers in the commercial communities can be resulted in the potential customer to loyal one (Morand, 2017;Plotnikova et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2021). It's difficult to start a new online community with a small number of self-selected members (Resnick et al, 2010).…”

“…In addition, the low sustained participation of many communities are surrounded by misconceptions, such as low usage and lurking phenomena users can view content but can't contribute to creating new content) and high churn rate (Bhattacherjee, 2001;Coussement et al, 2017;Debaere et al, 2018;Fullwood et al, 2019;Thomas et al, 2020;Chapman and Dilmperi, 2022). Hence, given the different challenges associated with the online community, for improvement in performance requires a better understanding of the different channels, their challenges, tactics and their longevity (Mishra et al, 2018;Ludwig et al, 2014;Plotnikova et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2021) there are very less evidence for the studies showing and exploring the challenges and dark side of the online communities. As far as we explored from literature, the challenges to user participation in online communities have not been studied (Guo and Fussell, 2022) widely.…”

“…They also form around common interests and pastimes. Many health-related online communities assist patients and their families by providing information, advice and support (Chen et al ., 2021). Students can take classes and connect with professors and peers over the Internet.…”

“…An online community, also known as an Internet community or web community, is a group of people who communicate over the internet (Herbert, 2012; Abedin et al ., 2019; Chen et al ., 2021). Members of a community have a lot of things in common (Guo and Fussell, 2022).…”