TY - JOUR

T1 - Communicative Care in Online Forums

T2 - How Burdened Informal Caregivers Seek Mediated Social Support

AU - Menke, Manuel

AU - Wagner, Anna J. M.

AU - Kinnebrock, Susanne

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - Health care in aging societies increasingly demands that relatives, partners, or friends provide informal care for loved ones at their end of life. Yet, being an informal caregiver involves significant health threats caused by so-called caregiver burden. To cope with the broad spectrum of challenges, informal caregivers seek social support in the care relationship network emerging around a (future) patient. However, obtaining social support is not limited to offline contexts. Members of online communities also provide experiential knowledge and social support. To explore how informal caregivers seek and provide social support online and how this is interrelated with their care relationship networks, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of 75 threads about advance care planning from German online forums (2003–2017). Our findings show that informal caregivers rely on what we conclusively coined communicative care (i.e., informational and emotional support in burdensome care situations), often in response to impaired offline relationships within care relationship networks

AB - Health care in aging societies increasingly demands that relatives, partners, or friends provide informal care for loved ones at their end of life. Yet, being an informal caregiver involves significant health threats caused by so-called caregiver burden. To cope with the broad spectrum of challenges, informal caregivers seek social support in the care relationship network emerging around a (future) patient. However, obtaining social support is not limited to offline contexts. Members of online communities also provide experiential knowledge and social support. To explore how informal caregivers seek and provide social support online and how this is interrelated with their care relationship networks, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of 75 threads about advance care planning from German online forums (2003–2017). Our findings show that informal caregivers rely on what we conclusively coined communicative care (i.e., informational and emotional support in burdensome care situations), often in response to impaired offline relationships within care relationship networks

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - advance care planning

KW - caregiver burden

KW - care relationship network

KW - communicative care

KW - distrust

KW - health care

KW - informal care

KW - online communities

KW - qualitative content analysis

KW - social support

UR - https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/12479/3015

M3 - Journal article

VL - 2020

SP - 1662

EP - 1682

JO - International Journal of Communication

JF - International Journal of Communication

SN - 1932-8036

IS - 14

ER -