A Health Professional–Led Synchronous Discussion on Facebook: Descriptive Analysis of Users and Activities

BACKGROUND: Arthritis is a major cause of pain and disability. Arthritis New Zealand (Arthritis NZ) is a nongovernmental organization that provides advocacy, information, and advice and support services for people with arthritis in New Zealand. Since many people seek health information on the Web, Arthritis NZ has a webpage and a Facebook page. In addition to static content, Arthritis NZ provides synchronous discussions with an arthritis educator each week via Facebook. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to describe participation and structure of synchronous discussion with a health educator on a social media platform and the type of information and support provided to people with arthritis during discussions on this social media platform. METHODS: Interpretive multimethods were used. Facebook Analytics were used to describe the users of the Arthritis NZ Facebook page and to provide descriptive summary statistics. Graphic analysis was used to summarize activity during a convenience sample of 10 arthritis educator–led synchronous discussions. Principles of thematic analysis were used to interpret transcripts of all comments from these 10 weekly arthritis educator–led discussions. RESULTS: Users of the Arthritis NZ Facebook page were predominantly female (1437/1778, 80.82%), aged 18 to 54 years. Three major activities occurred during arthritis educator–led synchronous discussions: (1) seeking or giving support; (2) information enquiry; and (3) information sharing across a broad range of topic areas, largely related to symptoms and maintaining physical functioning. There was limited peer-to-peer interaction, with most threads consisting of two-comment exchanges between the users and arthritis educators. CONCLUSIONS: Arthritis educator–led discussions provided a forum for informational and emotional support for users. The facilitated discussion forum for people with arthritis on Facebook could be enhanced by encouraging increased user participation and increasing peer-to-peer interactions and further training of arthritis educators in facilitation of Web-based discussion. Future research should focus on addressing barriers to user participation and assessing the impact of arthritis educator facilitation training, with the latter leveraging the Action Research paradigm.