Logo image
Understanding The Social Support Exchange of a Pregnancy After Loss Online Support Group
Conference proceeding

Understanding The Social Support Exchange of a Pregnancy After Loss Online Support Group

Michal Monselise and Christopher C Yang
2020 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI)
Nov 2020

Abstract

blockmodel analysis Informatics Medical services miscarriage online health communities perinatal loss Pregnancy social network analysis Social networking (online) Sociology Statistics Transmitters
Existing literature on miscarriage support seldom focuses on women who are pregnant after a loss despite research showing that these women have different social support needs from the general population of women who have suffered a loss. In light of this, we investigated an online support group for women who are pregnant after suffering a previous pregnancy loss in this study. The study utilized social network analysis to analyze the interactions between women of different gestational stages. We distinguish between the two types of social support exchanged in the group: informational and nurturant support. The graph structure allows us to learn about the progression of giving and receiving support as users progress through the gestational stages. Our study shows that informational support is mostly given by women in the later stages of their pregnancy to women in earlier stages. Most of the gestational stages only transmit or receive informational support but not both. Emotional support contains more reciprocal relationships between the gestational stages. We also aim to learn about the support exchanged in the group by analyzing the n-cliques formed in the group. We discuss how the findings of this research point to the importance of second trimester users in the group. We identify second trimester users that tend to spur more discussion in the group by interacting with more users, posting more messages, and having higher degree centrality.

Metrics

6 Record Views
2 citations in Scopus

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#3 Good Health and Well-Being
#5 Gender Equality

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Information Systems
Health Care Sciences & Services
Medical Informatics
Logo image