Social Support and Exchange Patterns in an Online Smoking Cessation Intervention Program

Smoking and tobacco use are acquired behaviors and the most preventable cause of death in United States. Many studies show that a large amount of diseases, deaths, years of potential life lost and productivity loses are associated with smoking and tobacco use. In the smoking cessation intervention programs, social support plays an important role in helping people establish positive attitudes and confidence to achieve better intervention outcomes. However, smoking quitters can only receive limited social support from traditional face-to-face intervention programs. With the development of Internet and social media, many online communities are developed for smoking cessation, where people can communicate with each other and social support is exchanged widely through their interactions without time and geographical limitations. To explore the exchange patterns of social support, this paper uses qualitative method to analyze the content of posts and comments in an online forum of smoking cessation called QuitNet. Different types of informational support and nurturant support offered are identified in the online forum. We define two exchange patterns of social support, which are "initiated support" that is offered voluntarily and "invited support" that is offered in response to the requests. It is found that more informational support is exchanged through social interactions from different users, although there are more expressions about nurturant support in the messages. Invited support is the prevalent exchange pattern. This study brings insights into social support offered in online communities of smoking cessation, which is helpful to understand the user behavior of online smoking cessation intervention programs.