Enacting compassion in mHealth: communicative subprocesses of compassionate coaching and their relationships to resilience during a prolonged pandemic

ABSTRACT

This study examines communicative enactments of compassion in mHealth-based coaching in the context of a prolonged pandemic. We conducted individual interviews with mHealth intervention participants in high and low resilience groups to investigate (a) the emerging patterns of compassionate coaching in mHealth and (b) the differences in coaching practices between the two groups. Our findings reveal how communication constitutes compassion by illustrating emerging mHealth practices that co-constructed the three subprocesses of compassion via virtual interactions: recognizing, relating, and (re)acting. Our study focuses specifically on unique communicative strategies designed according to mHealth affordances, environmental and relational contingencies, and participants’ health-related conditions and engagements. Further, the frequencies of compassionate coaching practices differed in high and low resilience groups, implying the influences of compassion on fostering resilience in a sustained crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Compassion
• resilience
• coaching
• patient-provider communication
• mHealth

Disclosure statement

The last author is affiliated with the organization that provides an mHealth intervention. However, he did not participate in data collection and analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea : [grant number NRF-2021S1A3A2A01096330]; Center for Innovation in Healthy and Resilient Aging, Arizona State University.