What is Spiritual Support and How Might It Impact the Design of Online Communities?

Spirituality is an understudied topic in social computing; however, for Online Health Community (OHC) users facing life-threatening illness, it is of fundamental importance. Through in-depth focus groups with OHC stakeholders in a US context, we derive a definition of "spiritual support" for use by designers and researchers who study online social support. We show that spiritual support is an integral dimension that underlies other social support types, and that if we ignore spirituality in design, we fail to mitigate problematic issues that arise in online spaces when users' spiritual values clash. Based on participants' ideations, we provide design implications for OHCs and other social media to better facilitate spiritual support through: (1) representing spiritual beliefs, (2) assistance with supportive communication, (3) support network visualization and mobilization, and (4) advance care planning and digital legacy.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.