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Abstract
This study investigated how online care pages help people connect with others and gain social support during a health care event. It reports the results of a survey of 1035 CaringBridge authors who set up personalized web pages because of hospitalization, serious illness, or other reasons, regarding the uses and gratifications obtained from their sites. Four primary benefits were found to be important to all authors of CaringBridge sites: providing information, receiving encouragement from messages, convenience, and psychological support. Hierarchical multiple regression revealed significant effects for six demographic and health-related variables: gender, age, religiosity, Internet usage, the purpose for which the site was set up, and sufficiency of information received from health care providers. Support was obtained for the perspective that online care pages provide new media gratifications for authors, and that health-related antecedents of media use may affect media selection and gratifications. The implications of this study for communication researchers and support services like CaringBridge are also discussed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported in part by a Towsley Foundation research scholarship. I would like to thank student researcher Lauren Halvorsen for help in reviewing the literature on Internet uses and gratifications and types of social support, and assisting in survey design. Many thanks also to Michael Roloff, Patrice Buzzanell, and Patricia Roehling for critiquing earlier versions of the article.