CS&E Team Wins Best Paper Award for Work with CaringBridge Communities

Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) PhD student Matthew Zent and recent CS&E alumnus Zach Levonian received the Best Paper Award at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) Conference for their paper titled, “Health Blog Recommender: Peer recommendation interventions for online social support.” Partnering with CaringBridge, Levonian and Zent’s paper focused on helping people find meaningful peer support online. CaringBridge is a health blog platform for people going through difficult health journeys, typically cancer, or other journeys that people blog about to stay connected with friends or family. 

“Our research asks a simple question, can recommendation systems help people find meaningful peer support online?” Zent said. “In some of Zach’s (Levonian) prior work, he found that CaringBridge authors who interact with other authors, including people that they don’t know in real life, experience a lot of benefits. They post more blogs, they stay on the site longer, and it’s correlations like these that have led quite a bit of prior work to conclude that peer matching in these online health contexts is a good idea.”

Levonian and Zent ran a small, early test to see whether this idea is safe and acceptable to users by observing these potential positive impacts in a real-world setting. They built a system where 79 authors on CaringBridge opted in to receive these peer recommendations via email over a 12 week period. This type of test avoided jumping into bigger, clinical trials that had risks, costs, and potential harm to people. Their results found that most people enjoyed the system and with limited evidence of harm. 

“It is really meaningful to me to see a system that has left a meaningful impact on our participants,” Zent said. “Hundreds of supportive interactions were in the forms of likes and comments on other authors' blog posts. They were sending posts to their friends and families. Authors in our study were invited to join their pages and interact with the health content that they were putting out.”

This project is an example of what is possible when you collaborate with real-world online communities and understand problems that are both interesting in the selected community and to the broader research community. The relationships formed from this experiment were important, because it allowed people to interact with different authors that they would not have otherwise.

“It is more effort to conduct an experiment like this at scale with real people in their community,” Zent said. “There are a lot of harms that you need to think about and address before it is appropriate to do this. This award is a way for the CSCW research community to show, acknowledge, and support this work, and signal to others that while academia doesn’t have many incentives to motivate community-based work, this type of research is something that we want to support.”

Learn more about these students' projects by checking out their blog post about their study.