Smoking cessation through online health communities: A social support perspective

Abstract

<p>Online health communities have been argued to play an important role in smoking quitting and maintenance from the social support perspective. But little is known about the character of online social support among Chinese smokers in online health communities. This study aims to explore what social support Chinese smokers share via online health communities. The data in a Chinese online community called Baidu Quitting Smoking Bar were crawled via pro-gramming. The content analysis was employed to analyze the content of messages. A pilot study was conducted to identify the classification of social support. Two threads with corresponding messages (N=835) were randomly selected and categorized based on the social support behavior code (SSBC). Findings shown that emotional support is the most widespread, following informational support, network and esteem support, while tangible support is rare. Surprisingly, self-disclosure is common in this online community. These messages only record smokers’ cessation progress or personal accomplishment without seeking social support. Further study will be conducted based on this pilot study to identify so-cial support for smoking cessation in online communities with the full data collected.<br /></p>