Week 1 + Week 2 = Done

Hi all,

Yep, I am back again! Sorry for the long break there but from now on I will only be posting once/twice a week (most likely on Fridays).  For this weeks post I will be addressing a few updates I have done with my project thus far, a bit about the related works of the project, ultimate deliverables, and a very loose timeline of our project.

What did you work on this week?

This week so far has been a bit of a variety show. For the overall REU project deliverables this week we began our final paper outline. In our outline so far my partner and I have added the outlines of the methods and related works sections. We initially struggled a bit with this because we did not know the proper formatting behind these sections, but then on Wednesday we had a great workshop taught by Ben Jelen one of our many mentors and it made everything much more clear and then we were able to knock that assignment out of the way!

Our specific assignment, which if you do not remember is it has to deal with using a common social platform such as Facebook and creating a private group for stigmatized patients such as those with HIV on it. Later, gathering data from this group and analyzing it for concurrent themes that can hopefully help us come up with some ideas how to best help them! With this in mind we have been assigned to read multiple related works to better understand what we will be dealing with in this project, transcribing interviews, helping simplify data into things like word counts, and well more READING!

So far I am enjoying the topic of our project and I am excited to delve into it even further!

Related Works: 

A few of our related works so far have included…

  • The Challenges of Seeking and Receiving Support for Women Living With HIV by Jennifer L. Patterson

Summary: 

This paper has a focus on exploring the social support challenges of women living with HIV. The methods used were after IRB approval participants were recruited and first audiotaped for in-depth interviews (approx. 45 min-1.5hrs) and before the interview these women were asked to complete a brief survey and sign an informed consent document. Key findings included that a key factor in coping with their HIV is social support but many of these women encountered many challenges in seeking and receiving social support. Such as, challenges with seeking support included stigma and lack of resources while challenges with receiving included a mismatch of goals, concern for the providers, a lack of independence, and the readiness to accept the support offered. This research serves as the initial step in the development of a normative model for social support of women living with HIV. My opinion is that this was an interesting research take, because most people associate HIV with males versus females so that they are often out of the equation. I think women needed a different type of support system than men do and that this research can potentially provide that.

Citation: 

Jennifer L. Peterson (2010) The Challenges of Seeking and Receiving Support for Women Living With HIV, Health Communication, 25:5, 470-479, DOI:10.1080/10410236.2010.484878

Link

  • Empowering processes in online support groups among people living with HIV/AIDS: A comparative analysis of ‘lurkers’ and ‘posters’ by Phoenix K.H. Mo *, Neil S. Coulson

Summary:

This paper takes the evidence from previous research showing that online support groups benefit posters with stigmatized diseases and focuses on the effect on lurkers, a hole in previous research. HIV patients who used online forums for support were surveyed with questions that they ranked on a scale about how they felt after interacting with these communities, and they were also asked how often they personally posted. Lurkers were defined as those who never posted to these online forums.. Lurkers were generally older, and in less advanced stages of their disease. While Lurkers missed out on some positive benefits of the community, the study concludes that there are many benefits that they seem to receive equally to posters, and that online communities are still a useful resource for them. I found this article to be really fascinating, as I could have seen the benefits for lurkers going either way. This paper also answers a question that I had with much of the other reading that exists on the benefits of online forums.

Citation:

Mo, Phoenix KH, and Neil S. Coulson. “Empowering processes in online support groups among people living with HIV/AIDS: A comparative analysis of ‘lurkers’ and ‘posters’.” Computers in Human Behavior 26.5 (2010): 1183-1193.

Link

I’m only going to be providing two related works for you all, but if you are interested and would like a few other cool articles about this topic feel free to contact me! I also have forward and backward citation trees for everything so reach out if you would like those as well or checkout mendeley or google scholar and find it out for yourself!

Ultimate Deliverables:

Here is a list of a few of our ultimate deliver thus far…

  • Have a paper done by the end of the ten weeks
  • Submit the Paper to CHI
  • Co-author the paper
  • Create a poster
  • Possibly multiple papers??? (Stretch)

Loose Timeline (still needs to be checked by mentors): 

Week 1: Get to know the basics of the ProHealth REU and meet other REU students and mentors!

Week 2: Have related work and methods outline done. Read and explore more about our specific project including transcribing, summaries, and starting to look at the data. Getting IRB confirmation and other accounts sorted.

Week 3: Draft for related work and methods and an outline for the introduction. Delve more into data analysis and finding major themes, along with looking into possible algorithms.

Week 4: Outline for abstract, draft for introduction, and peer reviews for both related work & methods. When found prominent themes, start doing more in depth analysis.

Week 5: Draft for abstract & related work, peer review for introduction, methods finalized, and an outline for findings and discussion.

Week 6: Peer review for abstract, drafts for introduction, findings, & discussion, and a finalized related work.

Week 7: Draft for abstract, finalized introduction, and peer review for findings & discussion.

Week 8: Peer review for abstract and drafts for findings & discussion.

Week 9: Finalized for abstract, findings, and discussion.

Week 10: Everything is camera ready!!!!

Happy FriYAY to you all!

Until Next Time…

Julia 🙂