Beyond the Share Button: Making Social Network Sites Work for Health and Wellness
By Sean Munson
NOTE: This is an introduction to the article, which appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of the IEEE Potentials magazine.
Click here to read the article.
At a a time when medical conditions, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, that can be prevented or managed with lifestyle changes are reaching record prevalence, the author and colleagues argue that learning when and how social media can appropriately and effectively help promote and support healthy behavior is a critical research challenge. The author has been studying one piece of this larger challenge, specifically, how can, and when should, designers of wellness activities integrate their interventions with social network sites such as Facebook to help people increase or maintain their wellness?
The article reviews the motivations for building wellness activities into social network sites and the results from three studies – two application deployments and an interview-based study of existing practices – that are helping investigators learn appropriate ways to leverage the potential of Facebook for health and wellness interventions. It then describes some of the challenges in doing so and concludes with future research and design directions.
Studies and experience show that people often benefit from social pressure and support, accountability, and advice from others, whether they are sharing with other participants in a wellness activity, other members of an online health community, or some friends and family on Facebook or Twitter. Online health communities connect people with similar experiences, and they offer their members opportunities for emotional support, advice, and accountability.
The author’s work focused on existing social network sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, because these spaces may offer unique advantages and opportunities for some types of sharing in comparison to online health communities. First, popular social network sites, such as Facebook, are already a gathering place and a part of people’s daily routines. Second, some activities that support wellness may be more effective when they are shared with existing connections, whose opinions matter, rather than with strangers in an online health community. In the studies, people talk about three benefits from even simply sharing health and wellness information on social network sites: making a good impression, inspiring others, and connecting with existing friends and family around wellness activities.
The author reports that while the studies support his intuitions about the potential benefits of sharing wellness information on Facebook, they also have shown challenges greater than he initially anticipated. These challenges relate to connecting with people who have the appropriate experience, managing impressions, sharing appropriately, and getting desired reactions.
After completing three studies, which are described in the article, the author believes that Facebook and other social network sites can be an important venue for social interactions around health and wellness. Participants wanted to share accountability, support, advice, celebrations, and inspirations with at least some of their existing friends and felt that existing social network sites could be a good environment for doing so. He also believes that the challenges of designing appropriate ways to connect around health and wellness in these spaces are greater than first anticipated, and that many of the current attempts to do so may be harmful for the people who use them. For instance, they may also get sarcastic and well-intentioned yet unhelpful replies. More work, then, is required to know how to build applications that help people share in ways that support their health and wellness goals while reducing the chance of negative or unhelpful interactions and consequences.
The author sees how this work can help researchers and practitioners better understand how social network sites can work for wellness, as well as identifying some of the barriers to successful health or wellness interactions on these sites. There remains much work to do, however.
Finally, though advancing some of these research challenges may enable building systems that better support health and wellness behaviors or behavior change, designers of these systems should constantly ask what it would be like to live with these systems. Systems that have been optimized to nudge or even push individuals to change their behavior – even when those individuals are explicitly pursuing those behavior changes – may lead to small individual health victories or progress toward societal goals at some cost to individual experiences and choices.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean Munson (samunson@umich.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He received his B.S. in engineering from Olin College in Needham, Massachusetts. His research interests include social computing and persuasive technology in the domains of wellness and political diversity.
