Newswise — Emotional support was the simplest and most common means of helping others in an online forum related to recovery from Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), according to a new study. Online communities are increasingly popular venues for discussing AUD. However, little is known about the effectiveness of such forums in helping participants—those giving or receiving support—to manage or curtail their alcohol use. Understanding the qualities and types of support offered online can illuminate social dynamics and potentially help steer individuals in recovery to favorable resources. For the study in Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research, investigators at the University of Pittsburgh identified types of social support provided on a public recovery forum of Reddit, a social media platform. Based on previous research, they conceptualized four types of social support: instrumental (direct aid), emotional (empathy and caring), appraisal (constructive feedback and affirmation), and informational (advice and instruction). Previous studies suggest that people in alcohol recovery might lean toward emotional support, though research is scarce, and appraisal support, in particular, has hardly been explored in the context of AUD.
Unusually, the researchers analyzed responses rather than original posts—specifically, users’ responses to posts in the StopDrinking recovery forum, a highly active, growing community on Reddit. The analysis covered four comments per day, randomly selected, each of which was the first direct response offering support to an original poster over a one-year period starting in October 2018. In all, 1,386 supportive responses involving 2,015 paragraphs of text were coded according to the type(s) of support contained. Types of support were then compared across metrics of text length, linguistic complexity, and sentiment.
Emotional support was most prevalent (74% of analyzed responses) and the sole form of support in 38% of cases. Emotionally supportive responses were relatively short, less complex, and positive in tone, even when combined with other forms of support. These responses often took the form of brief, even formulaic texts (e.g., “You got this” and “IWNDWYT,” an acronym—I will not drink with you today—apparently specific to this forum). Such posts may serve to reinforce community affiliation and social identities in recovery. Appraisal support (e.g., “Slipping up is normal,” “I wouldn’t do that if I were you”) was apparent in 55% of responses. Responses with appraisal support were longer, more complex, and less positive than responses offering emotional support alone. Informational support was identified in only 17% of responses—possibly reflecting a forum rule to speak from personal experience—and included recurring mentions of two self-help books relating to early stages of alcohol behavior change. These texts were similar to the appraisal responses in complexity and sentiment. No responses offered instrumental support, perhaps because forum rules discouraged sharing tangible resources. The researchers found substantial overlap among support types, with 40% of responses including two or more types.
The findings relating to the StopDrinking forum are among the first to quantify the prevalence of supportive responses to posts in an online recovery forum. The study provides a conceptual foundation for coding social support types and characterizing dynamics among online AUD communities. Additional research on social support characteristics across other forums is needed to understand how support dynamics may be impacted by characteristics such as overall activity levels or forum rules. Further research should also examine how users’ support offerings evolve and how providing different types of support might be associated with individual recovery processes and outcomes. It should be noted that focusing on initial responses within this particular forum may have skewed the analysis toward emotional support, and these results do not necessarily apply to other forums or social media communities.
Characterizing online social support for alcohol use disorder: A mixed-methods approach. J. Colditz, K.-H. Chu, L. Hsiao, E. Barrett, K. Kraemer, S. Pedersen. (pp xxx)
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