Abstract
The current study examined the effect of exposure to online support-seeking posts containing different levels of depth self-disclosure (baseline, peripheral, core) affecting the quality (person-centeredness and politeness) of participants’ support-provision messages. Participants of the study were assigned to the role of a support-provider. Compared to participants who read support-seeking posts with baseline and core self-disclosure, participants who read support-seeking posts with peripheral self-disclosure rated the support-seekers as less anonymous. Compared to participants who read support-seeking posts in the baseline condition, participants who read the support-seeking posts with peripheral self-disclosure wrote support-provision messages with higher level of person-centeredness and politeness. Participants’ perceived anonymity of the support-seekers mediated the effect of the depth of self-disclosure on the politeness of the response messages.
Highlights
Supportive interactions are ubiquitous in people’s everyday lives, and the positive impacts of social support on people’s mental and physical well-being have been well documented in the literature
Problem type did not moderate the effect of depth of self-disclosure on perceived anonymity, F(1,700) = 0.51, p = 0.60, ns, on the person-centeredness of the response messages, F(1,700) = 1.30, p = 0.27, ns, or on the politeness of the response messages, F(1,700) = 1.36, p = 0.26, ns
A Tukey LSD post hoc test showed that participants who read supportseeking posts containing peripheral self-disclosure (M = 4.63, SD = 1.20) indicated lower perceived anonymity of the supportseekers compared to those who read support-seeking posts containing core self-disclosure (M = 5.11, SD = 1.12), p < 0.001, and those who read support-seeking posts containing baseline self-disclosure, (M = 5.01, SD = 1.21), p < 0.001
Summary
Supportive interactions are ubiquitous in people’s everyday lives, and the positive impacts of social support on people’s mental and physical well-being have been well documented in the literature (for a review, see MacGeorge et al, 2011). Earlier research on online support groups has investigated several important aspects about online support, including (a) the association between participation in online support groups and the subsequent health outcomes (e.g., Mo and Coulson, 2013; Batenburg and Das, 2015), (b) typologies of solicited and provided social support in online support groups (see Rains et al, 2015 for a review), (c) types of discussion topics (Eichhorn, 2008; Coursaris and Liu, 2009), and (d) factors promoting/inhibiting participation in online support groups (Chung, 2013; Wright and Rains, 2013). Some scholars began to pay research attention to the link between supportseeking strategies and support-provision outcomes in online support groups (e.g., Li and Feng, 2015; Feng et al, 2016; Pan et al, 2018)
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