Cancer content and social media platform influence young adult cancer caregivers’ social support on social media

Abstract

Purpose

To determine how social media platform and cancer content is associated with the presence of social support in responses to young adult cancer caregivers’ (YACC) posts.

Design

We retrospectively collected YACC’s Facebook and/or Instagram posts and all responses from the first six months of caregiving.

Sample

Eligible YACC were 18-39, caring for a cancer patient diagnosed 6 months-5 years prior, spoke English, and used social media weekly.

Methods

Social media posts and responses were manually coded for five social support types, then transformed to depict the proportion of responses per post representing each type of support. Using mixed-effects models, we compared the distributions of responses with social support types by platform (Facebook vs. Instagram) and cancer content (no vs. yes).

Findings

More responses contained emotional support on Instagram than Facebook (B = 0.25, Standard Error (SE)=0.09, p = 0.007). More responses with cancer content contained ­validation support (B = 0.20, SE = 0.07, p = 0.002), but fewer contained emotional (B=-0.17, SE = 0.07, p = 0.02) and instrumental support (B=-0.06, SE = 0.02, p = 0.001) than posts without cancer content.

Conclusions

Studying the responsiveness of social media followers by platform and cancer content provides a foundation for intervention development.

Implications for psychosocial providers

Emphasizing the suitability of different social media platforms for particular support seeking behaviors is essential.

Keywords:

• cancer information
• caregiver
• social media
• social support

Acknowledgements

We appreciate support from the Huntsman-Intermountain Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology Program’s patient navigators, Sara Salmon and Tomoko Tsukamoto. This work was also supported by the Huntsman Cancer Institute’s Cancer Learning Center, the Wellness and Integrative Health Center, and the Communications and Social Media Outreach team. We also appreciate Ms. Samantha Pannier and Ms. Sara Shaw who supported participant recruitment at Huntsman Cancer Institute, and the caregiver and cancer advocacy groups who shared our recruitment materials on social media. We also thank the caregivers for the time they contributed to take part in the study.

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Echo Warner, Austin Waters, Taylor Nelson. Additional mentorship on data management and analysis was provided by Andrew Wilson and Ye Sun. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Echo Warner and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Availability of data and material

The data used in this study are available from the corresponding author within reasonable request.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in the study.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Ethical approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the University of Utah Institutional Review Board (IRB_00097575).

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F31CA221000 and T32CA078447. Additional support was provided by P30CA042014 from the National Cancer Institute (PI: Mary Beckerle). This study used REDCap, which is supported by 8UL1TR000105 (formerly UL1RR025764) of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The work was also made possible by support from Jonas Philanthropies, the Huntsman Cancer Institute Cancer Control and Population Sciences Department, and the Huntsman Intermountain Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology Program.