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.

Recently, diseases like H1N1 influenza, Ebola, and Zika virus have created severe crises, requiring public resources and personal behavior adaptation. Crisis Informatics literature examines interconnections of people, organizations, and IT during crisis events. However, how people use technology to cope with disease crises (outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics) remains understudied. We investigate how individuals used social media in response to the outbreak of Zika, focusing on travel-related decisions. We found that extreme uncertainty and ambiguity characterized the Zika virus crisis. To cope, people turned to social media for information gathering and social learning geared towards personal risk assessment and modifying decisions when dealing with partial and conflicting information about Zika. In particular, individuals sought local information and used socially informed logical reasoning to deduce the risk at a specific locale. We conclude with implications for designing information systems to support individual risk assessment and decision-making when faced with uncertainty and ambiguity during public health crises.

While research studies of digital and mobile payment systems in HCI have pointed out design opportunities situated within informal and nuanced mobile contexts, we have not yet understood how we can design digital monies to allow users to use monies more easily in these contexts. In this study, we examined the design of Alipay and WeChat Wallet, two successful mobile payment apps in China, which have been used by Chinese users for purposes such as playing, gifting, and ceremonial practices. Through semi-structured interviews with 24 Chinese users and grounded theory coding, we identified five contexts in which the flexibility and extensive functions of these payment apps have allowed these users to adaptively use digital monies in highly flexible ways. Finally, our analysis arrived at our conceptual frame-special digital monies-to highlight how digital monies, by allowing users to alter and define their transactional rules and pathways, could vastly expand the potential of digital monies to support users beyond standard retail contexts.

Objective Physician champions are “boots on the ground” physician leaders who facilitate the implementation of, and transition to, new health information technology (HIT) systems within an organization. They are commonly cited as key personnel in HIT implementations, yet little research has focused on their practices and perspectives. Materials and Methods We addressed this research gap through a qualitative study of physician champions that aimed to capture their challenges and strategies during a large-scale HIT implementation. Email interviews were conducted with 45 physician champions from diverse clinical areas 5 months after a new electronic health record (EHR) system went live in a large academic medical center. We adopted a grounded theory approach to analyze the data. Results Our physician champion participants reported multiple challenges, including insufficient training, limited at-the-elbow support, unreliable communication with leadership and the EHR vendor, as well as flawed system design. To overcome these challenges, physician champions developed their own personalized training programs in a simulated context or in the live environment, sought and obtained more at-the-elbow support both internally and externally, and adapted their departmental sociotechnical context to make the system work better. Discussion and Conclusions This study identified the challenges physician champions faced and the strategies they developed to overcome these challenges. Our findings suggest factors that are crucial to the successful involvement of physician champions in HIT implementations, including the availability of instrumental (eg, reward for efforts), emotional (eg, mechanisms for expressing frustrations), and peer support; ongoing engagement with the champions; and appropriate training and customization planning.

Disruptive behaviors such as flaming and vandalism have been part of the Internet since its beginning. Various models of hierarchical governance have been established and managed in different online venues, with both successes and failures. Recently, a new model of non-hierarchical governance has emerged using crowdsourcing technology to allow an online community to manage itself. How do people view and work with non-hierarchical governance? In this paper, we present an interview study with people from two sites: the video game League of Legends and Weibo, a microblogging site in China. We found that people were passionate about participation in crowdsourcing, but at the same time, struggled with the system, and acted beyond their designated role within the system. We derive implications for designing online non-hierarchical governance from our research.

Recent scholarship in sustainable HCI has called for research beyond change at the individual level. This paper aims to contribute to research on community-level sustainable practices. We report an ethnographic study of the Transition movement, a global social movement encouraging sustainability. We discuss how Transition movement participants in Totnes, UK mobilized community resources, developing a shared moral sense about sustainability, and undertaking positive, collective, community actions. We discuss how sustainable HCI can engage communitylevel practices.

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Today eSports gaming is enjoying growing popularity in the world and much attention from various research areas, including CSCW. eSports gaming is a highly competitive environment commonly associated with negative emotions such as anxiety and stress. However, little attention has been paid to emotion regulation in eSports gaming. In this study, we empirically investigated how players experience emotion and regulate emotions in League of Legends, one of the largest eSports games today. We identify four emotive factors, as well as emotion regulation strategies that players deploy to manage the emotions of their selves, teammates, and opponents. We further report on how they use emotion regulation in emotional self-care and emotional leadership. Building upon this set of findings, we discuss how the competitive eSports gaming context conditions emotion regulation in League of Legends, foreground emotion regulation expertise in competitive gaming, and derive implications for designing emotion regulation technologies.