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International Conference on Social Informatics

SocInfo 2016: Social Informatics pp 439–453Cite as

Empirical Analysis of Social Support Provided via Social Media

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10047))

Abstract

Social media are an effective means for people to share everyday problems with their peers. Although this often leads to empathic responses which help alleviate the experienced stress, such peer support is not always available. As an alternative solution for such situations, this paper explores the possibilities to develop an ‘artificial friend’ that offers online social support through text messages. To formulate the requirements for such a system, a pilot study was performed in which 230 participants were asked (via a crowdsourcing platform) to report their experiences regarding online peer support. The results have been converted into a number of working hypotheses about online peer support. Based on these hypotheses, a conceptual framework has been developed that describes the functioning of the proposed support system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Copyright © 2016 CrowdFlower Inc. Available at https://www.crowdflower.com/. Accessed: 2016-07-14.

  2. 2.

    We decided to use these strategies given by Gross [9] since it is a very well accepted work in the scientific community and we aimed to check to what extent such strategies, which are originally defined in the scope of emotional self-regulation, are also used in our context (friends trying to regulate peers’ emotion). The idea to use Gross’ strategies in an interpersonal manner was also adopted by other researchers, for instance in [19].

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to state that Lenin Medeiros’ stay at Vrije Universtiteit Amsterdam was funded by the Brazilian Science without Borders program. This work was realized with the support from CNPq, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development - Brazil, through a scholarship which reference number is 235134/2014-7. We also would like to thank all the people who gave us important data by answering our questionnaire.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Behavioural Informatics Group, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Lenin Medeiros & Tibor Bosse

Authors
  1. Lenin Medeiros
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  2. Tibor Bosse
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Correspondence to Lenin Medeiros .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Emma Spiro

  2. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Yong-Yeol Ahn

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Medeiros, L., Bosse, T. (2016). Empirical Analysis of Social Support Provided via Social Media. In: Spiro, E., Ahn, YY. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10047. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47873-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47874-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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