Work

Peer Recommendation Interventions for Health-related Social Support: a Feasibility Assessment

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Online health communities (OHCs) offer the promise of connecting with supportive peers. Forming these connections first requires finding relevant peers—a process that can be time-consuming. Peer recommendation systems are a computational approach to make finding peers easier during a health journey. By encouraging OHC users to alter their online social networks, peer recommendations could increase available support. But these benefits are hypothetical and based on mixed, observational evidence. To experimentally evaluate the effect of peer recommendations, we conceptualize these systems as health interventions designed to increase specific beneficial connection behaviors. In this paper, we designed a peer recommendation intervention to increase two behaviors: reading about peer experiences and interacting with peers. We conducted an initial feasibility assessment of this intervention by conducting a 12-week field study in which 79 users of CaringBridge.org received weekly peer recommendations via email. Our results support the usefulness and demand for peer recommendation and suggest benefits to evaluating larger peer recommendation interventions. Our contributions include practical guidance on the development and evaluation of peer recommendation interventions for OHCs.

Source: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

DOI: 10.1145/3711044

Authors: Zachary Levonian, Matthew Zent, Ngan Nguyen, Matthew McNamara, Loren Terveen, Svetlana Yarosh

Institution: University of Minnesota

Language: English

Topic: Health Literacy and Information Accessibility

Subfield: General Health Professions

Field: Health Professions

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: University of Minnesota