The Effects of Expressing Religious Support Online for Breast Cancer Patients

ABSTRACT

The growth of online support groups has led to an expression effects paradigm within the health communication literature. Although religious support expression is characterized as a typical subdimension of emotional support, we argue that in the context of a life-threatening illness, the inclusion of a religious component creates a unique communication process. Using data from an online group for women with breast cancer, we test a theoretical expression effects model. Results demonstrate that for breast cancer patients, religious support expression has distinct effects from general emotional support messages, which highlights the need to further theorize expression effects along these lines.

Notes

¹ We included several exogenous variables in the model and controlled the effects of those variables. However, for the sake of clearer presentation, the paths from exogenous variables were not presented.

² Given that the relatively small number of sample in our data (N = 192), although comprehensive, might result in biased standard errors, we used the MLR estimator. In order to be more confident in our findings, we also bootstrapped the data to find the empirical standard errors and asymmetric confidence intervals for the indirect effect using the maximum likelihood parameter estimation. We generated a total of 500 bootstrapped samples with the 192 cases. As a result, not only did the overall model fit statistics remain consistent (χ²(19) = 33.26, p < .02, CFI = .97, TLI = .91, RMSEA = .06, and SRMR = .03), but all of the direct and indirect effects of the MLR model and the bootstrapped model are also consistent regarding the direction of effect as well as statistical significance.