Effects of Support-Seekers’ Community Knowledge on Their Expressed Satisfaction with the Received Comments in Mental Health Communities

Abstract

Online mental health communities (OMHCs) are prominent resources for improving people's mental wellbeing. An immediate cue of such improvement is support-seekers' satisfaction expressed in their replies to the received comments. However, the comments that seekers find satisfying may change with their community knowledge, e.g., measured by tenure and posting experience in that community. In this paper, we first model the amount of satisfaction conveyed in the support-seekers' replies to the received comments. Then we quantitatively examine how seekers' expressed satisfaction is affected by their community knowledge, sought and received support in an OMHC. Results show that support-seekers with more posting experience generally display less contentment to the received comments. Compared to newcomers, higher tenured members express less satisfaction when receiving informational support. We also found that support matching positively predicts seekers' satisfaction regardless of their community knowledge. Our findings have implications for OMHCs to satisfy support-seekers through their community knowledge. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

Empirical study of factors that influence the perceived usefulness of online mental health community members

“…One of the main forms of communication among members in an OMHC is that help-seekers initiate posts (help-seeking posts) and supporters reply (reply posts). Through these types of posts, members can provide each other with emotional, informational, and other forms of support (Peng et al, 2021). Psychological support-seekers judge the responses of social supporters through information disclosure, information quality, and perceived credibility of information source; they perceive usefulness from the responses, and thus decide whether to engage in further self-disclosure and/or deep interaction (support-seekers respond to the reply posts, i.e., re-posts), as shown in Figure 1.…”

Exploring the Effects of AI-assisted Emotional Support Processes in Online Mental Health Community

“…Online mental health communities (OMHCs) are the prevalent medium of exchanging social support with peers experiencing similar challenges, providing high accessibility and anonymity [21,24,25,28,38]. To date, several studies have explored the dynamics of peer supports in OMHCs or mental health-related discussions, such as relationship between user satisfaction and their community knowledge [28], cross-cultural variances of OMHCs [26], and motivations and practices of mental health discussions in Twitch [40].…”

“…Specifically, previous works suggested that people were more satisfied when their received support matches the needed support [41,42], in the form of informational or emotional support. These are known to increase both members' commitment and satisfaction when they sought and received the matched support [28,44]. Here, emotional supports are particularly known to lead support-seeker to express more satisfaction when receiving emotional support from the reaction [28].…”

“…These are known to increase both members' commitment and satisfaction when they sought and received the matched support [28,44]. Here, emotional supports are particularly known to lead support-seeker to express more satisfaction when receiving emotional support from the reaction [28]. Thus, to guide longlasting and thriving OMHC environments, it is crucial to ensure emotional supports between seekers and providers.…”

“…In OMHCs, supports between providers and seekers are often shared as a form of post, a text-based unit that basically contains content written by the seeker and its comments from the providers. Specifically, this process can be conceptualized with the following interactions: (i) seekers post their emotional contexts, (ii) providers explore such posts in the community, and they (iii) react to the post [12,27,28,38]. Thus, we designed our proposed system by following three interactions: 3.2.1 Writing a post.…”