A practical guide to analysing online support forums

ABSTRACT

As the number of online support forums continues to grow and the amount of user-generated content increases, analysing forum messages can provide researchers and others working in health-related fields with important new insights into the needs, opinions, and experiences of individuals who use them. There has been a lack of guidance on how to make the best use of user-generated content within forums as a data source in research studies. This article explains the practical, ethical, and methodological issues associated with this type of research. It describes the benefits of forum research, the organisational structure of forums, how forums are selected for research, approaches to sampling, preparing data for analysis, and methods of analysis. The decisions that researchers need to make during each stage of the research process are explained, describing the options available and the ethical dilemmas to be considered to successfully develop, implement, and complete a research project.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• forum
• online support communities
• research methods
• sampling typology

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr. Heather Buchanan, Dr. Laura Condon, and Karen Shepherd for their helpful and constructive feedback on a previous draft of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard M. Smedley

Richard M. Smedley has recently completed a PhD in Health Psychology in the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham. His research examines how engaging with discussion forums can help individuals with the self-care and self-management of long-term health conditions.

Neil S. Coulson

Neil S. Coulson is a professor of Health Psychology in the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham. As a health psychologist, his programme of research examines how social media impacts on the experience of long-term illness. His current interests focus on the role of discussion forums and the links between active engagement and various health-related and psychosocial outcomes.