Blogging for Better Health: Putting the "Public" Back in Public health
researchers:
Sundar, S. S., Edwards, H. H. (faculty)
Hu, Y., & Stavrositu, C. (graduate students).
This paper was presented at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, San Francisco, CA, 2006.
Introduction
The widespread diffusion of the underlying RSS (really simple syndication) technology, blogs have become commonplace in the online media landscape. Most high-profile bloggers are political journalists and most of the scholarly attention thus far has focused on the impact of this new venue on civic participation and the future of democracy. Relatively little media and scholarly attention has been paid to personal blogs that discuss topics other than politics. For example, the burgeoning number of health blogs has gone virtually unnoticed in mainstream media and the academic discourse about blogs.
research question
Our investigation is an effort to remedy this shortcoming by focusing on health blogs and stimulate a research agenda in this direction.
Method
We begin by considering technological factors characterizing the blog as a tool of mass communication and discuss the ensuing psychological considerations. Using this framework, we examine a sample of mental-health blogs in an effort to understand their nature and characteristics with a view to enhancing our theoretical understanding of this new medium of communication and articulating its role in the future of health communication.
Results
Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed specific mental health blog trends for each of the
three dimensions we investigated. With respect to bloggers’ characteristics, it was revealed that most bloggers are young (20 to 30 years old) women patients (i.e., diagnosed with a mental disorder by a mental health professional). Furthermore, most bloggers reveal personal identifiers; women do so more than men, and patients do so more than professionals. In terms of motivations, most bloggers appear to write mainly for themselves, but with an awareness of their audience, from whom they welcome feedback. For example, most authors allow readers not only to read, but also to comment. Social connectedness is revealed by the positive relationships between blogroll size and number of comments, as well as blogroll size and number of posts. Bloggers use posts to cope with a disease significantly more than to talk about causes, symptoms or diagnosis. As for identity construction, our analysis indicates the authors may have more than one blogger identity and use
blogs as a tool to explore multiple facets of their identities.
Finally, with regard to the nature of mental health blogs, most content revolves around the issues of treatment and coping, and is mostly emotional in nature, whether it is in the form of bloggers’ posts or readers’ comments. Surprisingly, these content-specific patterns do not appear to vary as a function of bloggers’ gender.
Conclusions
Overall, this study clearly highlights the importance of self in blogging, thus lending support to the agency model. There is plenty of evidence to suggest a high level of involvement with one’s illness through the blog and also a major preoccupation with negotiating one’s identity. Mental health blogs have the real potential to put the public back into public health. |