Harnessing Facilitated Digital Health Communities to Support Empowerment of Informal Carers of People with Mental Illness: Effect of Enablers and Inhibitors

Sethibe, Tsholofelo Jacqueline

Harnessing Facilitated Digital Health Communities to Support Empowerment of Informal Carers of People with Mental Illness: Effect of Enablers and Inhibitors

Sethibe, Tsholofelo Jacqueline

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2021

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Sethibe, Tsholofelo Jacqueline
dc.date.accessioned	2023-01-13T03:15:31Z
dc.date.available	2023-01-13T03:15:31Z
dc.date.issued	2021
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/164954
dc.description	University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.	en_US.UTF-8
dc.description.abstract	Digital health communities (DHCs) provide support to users by generating resources which can empower them. The thesis examines how the resources drive empowerment for decision-making, through the lens of the empowerment theory. It employs a mixed-methods design to study a facilitated digital health community of informal carers of people with mental illness in Australia. The design follows an exploratory sequential plan, specifically employing a qualitative-qualitative-quantitative approach. First, extant literature search was carried out to identify relevant concepts, which were refined through expert interviews for the study. Then a content analysis of 3157 posts was performed on online discussions to find the existence of empowerment. The proposed model is validated by an online survey of 105 informal carers who utilise this digital health community, and the survey outcomes were analysed with PLS-SEM. Results show that empowerment exists in DHCs and is identified by the affective dimension in addition to intrapersonal, interactional, and behavioural dimensions. In addition, the type of approach a facilitator uses to coordinate interactions (facilitator presence), contributes to the carers’ ability to make decisions, whether health or non-health related decisions. That is, collaborative and motivating approaches encourage the use of a digital health community and augments empowerment, while a commanding approach discourages use. Findings also confirm that social support and experiential expertise, as enablers, are good predictors of carer empowerment, while inhibiting factors (emotional contagion, social overload, and social network fatigue) cannot predict empowerment. Furthermore, facilitator support moderates the relationship between the use of digital health community and social support and experiential expertise, while it has no moderating effect on the inhibiting factors. The findings provide foundations for further investigation into empowerment, in particular, how can it be fostered for improved decision-making in digital health communities and other contexts.	en_US.UTF-8
dc.format	Thesis (PhD)
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US.UTF-8
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/164954/2/02whole.pdf
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/ppc
dc.title	Harnessing Facilitated Digital Health Communities to Support Empowerment of Informal Carers of People with Mental Illness: Effect of Enablers and Inhibitors	en_US.UTF-8
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*

Abstract:

Digital health communities (DHCs) provide support to users by generating resources which can empower them. The thesis examines how the resources drive empowerment for decision-making, through the lens of the empowerment theory. It employs a mixed-methods design to study a facilitated digital health community of informal carers of people with mental illness in Australia. The design follows an exploratory sequential plan, specifically employing a qualitative-qualitative-quantitative approach. First, extant literature search was carried out to identify relevant concepts, which were refined through expert interviews for the study. Then a content analysis of 3157 posts was performed on online discussions to find the existence of empowerment. The proposed model is validated by an online survey of 105 informal carers who utilise this digital health community, and the survey outcomes were analysed with PLS-SEM. Results show that empowerment exists in DHCs and is identified by the affective dimension in addition to intrapersonal, interactional, and behavioural dimensions. In addition, the type of approach a facilitator uses to coordinate interactions (facilitator presence), contributes to the carers’ ability to make decisions, whether health or non-health related decisions. That is, collaborative and motivating approaches encourage the use of a digital health community and augments empowerment, while a commanding approach discourages use. Findings also confirm that social support and experiential expertise, as enablers, are good predictors of carer empowerment, while inhibiting factors (emotional contagion, social overload, and social network fatigue) cannot predict empowerment. Furthermore, facilitator support moderates the relationship between the use of digital health community and social support and experiential expertise, while it has no moderating effect on the inhibiting factors. The findings provide foundations for further investigation into empowerment, in particular, how can it be fostered for improved decision-making in digital health communities and other contexts.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/164954