Assessment of Social Support and Quitting Smoking in an Online Community Forum: Study Involving Content Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: A key factor in successfully reducing and quitting smoking, as well as preventing smoking relapse is access to and engagement with social support. Recent technological advances have made it possible for smokers to access social support via online community forums. While community forums associated with smoking cessation interventions are now common practice, there is a gap in understanding how and when the different types of social support identified by Cutrona and Suhr (1992) (emotional, esteem, informational, tangible, and network) are exchanged on such forums. Community forums that entail "superusers" (a key marker of a successful forum), like QuitNow, are ripe for exploring and leveraging promising social support exchanges on these platforms. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to characterize the posts made on the QuitNow community forum at different stages in the quit journey, and determine when and how the social support constructs are present within the posts. METHODS: A total of 506 posts (including original and response posts) were collected. Using conventional content analysis, the original posts were coded inductively to generate categories and subcategories, and the responses were coded deductively according to the 5 types of social support. Data were analyzed using Microsoft Excel software. RESULTS: Overall, individuals were most heavily engaged on the forum during the first month of quitting, which then tapered off in the subsequent months. In relation to the original posts, the majority of them fit into the categories of sharing quit successes, quit struggles, updates, quit strategies, and desires to quit. Asking for advice and describing smoke-free benefits were the least represented categories. In relation to the responses, encouragement (emotional), compliment (esteem), and suggestion/advice (informational) consistently remained the most prominent types of support throughout all quit stages. Companionship (network) maintained a steady downward trajectory over time. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study highlight the complexity of how and when different types of social support are exchanged on the QuitNow community forum. These findings provide directions for how social support can be more strategically employed and leveraged in these online contexts to support smoking cessation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".