Coole, Matthew

Lobban, Fiona

Rayson, Paul

Lancaster E-Prints

iPOF: Improving Peer Online ForumsFiona Lobban, Paul Rayson, Matthew Coole, and iPOF TeamLancaster UniversityThe Improving Peer Online Forums (iPOF) project1 seeks to understand how online mental healthforums work, why people find them useful, and how they can be improved. Our work will use realistapproaches to help build a series of interventions that can assist moderators and administrators improveonline mental health forums. These interventions will be formulated and tested by a team made up ofhealth care professionals, clinical researchers, linguists and data scientists.People experiencing mental health difficulties often look for help online. This has increased duringCovid-19, because it has been harder to get in-person help. Online searches will lead them to a range ofmental health peer forums. These are websites where people with a shared interest or concern can “post”messages to others and get their advice and support. Online forums can be very helpful. Some peoplereport feeling less distressed, less alone, and more able to cope. However, others have reported feelingmore distressed and less able to cope after using forums. We do not know why these differences occur.This means we do not know how to make forums better, or which ones should be offered to people seekinghelp.We aim to find out: how online mental health forums work; why some work better than others; andwhy some people find them helpful and others do not. Based on what we find, we will work with peoplewho use forums; people employed to support forums; and people who set up and fund forums; to developtools to improve the design and support from online mental health forums.Throughout the research, we will work closely with our three Expert Groups. Group 1 (PPI) includespeople with lived experience of mental health problems and using forums, and people who support theforums (called moderators). Group 2 (Host) includes people who design and run the forums. Group3 (Impact) are senior people who can help make sure our findings make a difference to policies andprocedures which determine how forums are designed and funded in future.We have three overlapping work-streams. In work-stream 1 (1-18 months), we will pull togetherrelevant knowledge from research literature. We will also interview people who currently use, support,or have studied online forums. Based on what we find, we will come up with ideas about how onlineforums work and develop some specific theories to test. In work-stream 2 (6-30 months), we will test andrefine our theories in a range of different mental health forums. We will use surveys to measure impactsfor different groups of forum members. We will use interviews with forum members and people whosupport them to understand their experiences. We will analyse what is happening in the text of the forumconversations using natural language processing and corpus linguistics methods. At regular time points,we will share our findings with our Expert Groups, and work with them to come up with our final theories.In work-stream 3 (2-34 months), we will use the theories to create tools and training designed to improvepeer online forums. We will work with our Expert Groups to ensure these are designed and shared in waysthat make them easy to find and use. We cannot say now exactly what the tools will be until we have donethe research. However, the PPI work we did tells us people want: attractive ways to promote online mentalhealth forums; guidance for designing and setting up online mental health forums; training for people whosupport forums; an online space for these supporters to work together to build up this role and their skills.1Funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR): https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/award/NIHR1340351

iPOF: Improving Peer Online Forums

https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/188396/1/iPOF_HealTAC2022_Poster_Abstract.pdf

iPOF: Improving Peer Online Forums

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