Emerging adult college students' descriptions of exposure to childhood emotional abuse and associated factors: A qualitative exploration.

BACKGROUND: Growing evidence on the long-term deleterious impacts of emotional abuse highlights the need to further understand childhood emotional abuse and its context to strengthen prevention efforts. OBJECTIVE: To describe emerging adults' experiences of emotional abuse in their childhoods and the household context surrounding that abuse. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Fifty-eight interviews were conducted with emerging adults, ages 18-25, recruited from four 2- and 4-year institutions of higher education. METHODS: Thematic analysis was conducted to identify and describe patterns in the data. A cyclical approach to codebook development and data analysis was followed by a team of four coders. RESULTS: Themes related to participants' experiences of emotional abuse included: inability to meet parent expectations; parent attacks on the child's character; parent negative comparisons to siblings and others; parent invalidation of the child's emotions and mental health needs; and evolution over time in the parent-child relationship. Aspects of childhood family environments contemporaneous with the childhood emotional abuse included: financial stress; parent mental illness; parent divorce, separation, or volatile relationship; parent adversity or trauma; physical abuse; and young parent age. Many participants identified these aspects of their family environment, most of which could potentially be improved with sufficient support, as playing causal roles in the emotional abuse they experienced. CONCLUSION: This descriptive qualitative study provides additional insight into child emotional abuse and its associated factors, providing invaluable insights that can enhance current measurement and intervention approaches.

Online Support Seeking and Breast Cancer Patients: Changes in Support Seeking Behavior following Diagnosis and Transition off Cancer Therapy.

Transitions in breast cancer care are associated with significant increases in stress and anxiety, and this stress can negatively impact mental and physical health. Social support has been shown to alleviate such distress, but whether, how, and how often social support is accessed through existing support networks is unclear. Our study examines changes in social media use following breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, using hand-coded longitudinal data from 30 breast cancer survivors' Facebook pages for the 6 months surrounding cancer diagnosis and for the 6 months surrounding transition off cancer therapy. Results revealed that following diagnosis, there was a significant increase in posting behavior and self-disclosure. However, this increase in posts did not correspond to an increase in support requests. In addition, while participants' primary support requests were for resources, support provided tended to be lower-cost emotional support. Finally, temporal maps indicated that participants started off increasing their engagement but withdrew over time. Our findings suggest that Facebook offered participants a platform for continued social engagement and self-disclosure - but showed several indications that support was principally low-effort, limited quality, and ill-fitting.

Online social support among breast cancer patients: longitudinal changes to Facebook use following breast cancer diagnosis and transition off therapy.

PURPOSE: Active social engagement, both on and offline, is widely recognized as an important buffer against the negative effects of cancer-related stress. Nevertheless, studies show that social stigma can lead to a decrease in available social support following cancer diagnosis. This study examines whether Facebook friends provide continuous, health-promoting social support to breast cancer patients following transitions in care. METHODS: To examine support provided to breast cancer patients, we hand-coded 21,291 status updates and wall posts with respect to both post content and support exchange. We then use descriptive statistics, pairwise t tests, and temporal maps to show whether posts received more likes, comments, or unique commenters following breast cancer diagnosis and the post content that was most likely to garner positive responses from Facebook friends. RESULTS: Results showed an initial increase across all three support metrics (likes, comments, and unique commenters) after cancer diagnosis but that all three metrics decrease steadily over time. Results also revealed significant decreases in the average number of comments and number of commenters following transition off cancer treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, our results reveal that while support is available through Facebook, support may be sporadic, characterized by limited engagement and low cost. There is also limited support available through Facebook to weather the stress of transition off cancer treatment. IMPLICATIONS FOR CANCER SURVIVORS: Facebook is an important feature in people's lives, particularly among the demographic most impacted by breast cancer. Our results suggest that social media can be useful in accessing support but should be used with caution.

Codifying Online Social Support for Breast Cancer Patients: Retrospective Qualitative Assessment.

BACKGROUND: Social media has emerged as the epicenter for exchanging health-related information, resources, and emotional support. However, despite recognized benefits of social media for advancing health-promoting support exchange, researchers have struggled to differentiate between the different ways social support occurs and is expressed through social media. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to develop a fuller understanding of social support exchange by examining the ways in which breast cancer patients discuss their health needs and reach out for support on Facebook and to develop a coding schema that can be useful to other social media researchers. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective qualitative assessment of text-based social support exchanges through Facebook among 30 breast cancer survivors. Facebook wall data were systematically scraped, organized, coded, and characterized by whether and which types of support were exchanged. Research questions focused on how often participants posted related to cancer, how often cancer patients reached out for support, and the relative frequency of informational, instrumental, or socioemotional support requests broadcast by patients on the site. RESULTS: A novel ground-up coding schema applied to unwieldy Facebook data successfully identified social support exchange in two critical transitions in cancer treatment: diagnosis and transition off cancer therapy. Explanatory coding, design, and analysis processes led to a novel coding schema informed by 100,000 lines of data, an a priori literature review, and observed online social support exchanges. A final coding schema permits a compelling analysis of support exchange as a type of peer community, where members act proactively to buffer stress effects associated with negative health experiences. The coding schema framed operational definitions of what support meant and the forms each type of support could take in social media spaces. CONCLUSIONS: Given the importance of social media in social interaction, support exchange, and health promotion, our findings provide insight and clarity for researchers into the different forms informational, resource, and emotional support may take in Web-based social environments. Findings support broader continuity for evaluating computer-mediated support exchange.