Moments of Change

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

“…The communication between these support-seekers and providers usually happened in the posted threads created by the seekers, with text as the conversational medium [28,56,67]. Previous research has suggested that participating in the communication in OMHCs could improve members' mental health [34,46,57,58,61,64,68]. For example, Rains et al conducted a meta-analysis of computer-mediated support groups and found that long-term participation in such communities was associated with less depression, greater quality of life, and improved self-efficacy in managing their health conditions [61].…”

“…[46]. Pruksachatkun et al studied thread discussions in an OMHC and found that support-seekers can experience a positive cognitive change in peer-to-peer conversations [58]. Support-seekers' satisfaction with the received comments is also one symbol that indicates mental health improvement and can be quickly assessed from their replies to those comments [70].…”

“…They then finish a HIT of five labeling sessions one by one, where a HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task that a worker can complete in MTurk [1] to get a reward -$0.42 for around 3.5-minutes workload in our case; US min wage of $7.25 per hour in 2020. In each session, they read one post-comment-reply triple and answer four questions about the support-seeker's satisfaction expressed in the reply, i.e., overall satisfaction, satisfaction with the received health information, change in sentiment, and change of closeness to the other members of the community [58,70]. These questions are measured on 7-point Likert scales, with either "1 -Completely dissatisfied, 7 -Completely satisfied" or "1 -Decreased very much, 7 -Increase very much".…”

“…While previous works (e.g., [70,77]) limit the analyses on the first received comment and the corresponding seekers' reply to avoid the complexity of the thread structure, we do not restrict the position of the comment and reply since we are interested in studying seekers' satisfaction with each comment. We acknowledge that the accumulated support of previous comments in the thread might affect support-seekers' views on the incoming one [58,66]. Fourth, as our primarily focused predictors are support-seekers' community knowledge, sought and received support, we treat other factors such as anonymity [2,4], gender, and culture [58] of the members as random factors.…”

“…For example, in Reddit NoDepr 1 , one can create a support-seeking post about depressing problems and interact with other community members who comment on the post. By tracking content and emotional changes in posts over a long period, researchers have found evidence that OMHCs are generally effective in improving their members' mental health, such as reducing depression [51,61] and bringing positive cognitive change [58]. However, to obtain an immediate sense of whether the needs of members reaching out for help are met -a crucial determinant of their intention to stay in and get benefits from the community [38,49,63,74], OMHCs would need to exploit more instantaneous cues, such as support-seekers' satisfaction with the received comments [70].…”