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

TL;DR

This study evaluates the feasibility of peer recommendation interventions in online health communities, showing they can effectively promote supportive behaviors and are well-received by users, with potential for larger-scale benefits.

Contribution

The paper provides practical guidance on designing and assessing peer recommendation systems as health interventions in online communities.

Findings

Peer recommendations increased user engagement in reading and interacting with peers.

Participants showed demand and positive response to the recommendation system.

Feasibility of implementing peer recommendation interventions was demonstrated in a 12-week study.

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 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.