| Depression has increasingly become an important disease threatening global mental health and quality of life.With the rise of the digital internet,the network support community gathers the depressed patients in real life from isolated individuals into a virtual group,organization,or even a possible community,which makes them have important social support from weak connections from the isolated and helpless state in real life.Therefore,the network support community is considered as one of the important ways to intervene in depression in the era of social media.In this dissertation,I focus on the largest depression virtual community ——depression Baidu Tieba and mainly solve the following question: what is the structure and basic situation of social support system in Baidu Tieba.Specifically,first,content analysis is used to explore what kind of and how often does different social support type(such as emotional support and informational support)occur from the posts;second,the characteristics and the perceived social support of the members in depression Baidu Tieba is considered by online survey;finally,we interview the leaders in this virtual community to know further about how they provide social support for depression members? In sum,conclusions are given about what does the overall social support landscape like in depression Baidu Tieba and do the three different social support forms studied above play a synergistic and complementary role in function? And what is the logic between them?This paper plans to explore the above issues from the following three aspects in detail:1.Firstly,starting from the objective text of depression Baidu Tieba,this paper studies the demand and supply of social support reflected in the daily practice of interaction and communication between members,and the relationship between the demand and supply of social support and the gender as well as the activity level of members,which is from the perspective of others,text-based and objective.2.Secondly,the perceived social support of members was analyzed by questionnaire.The main variables include: the degree of integration of Tieba use(that is,the degree of members integrating depression Baidu Tieba into daily life),perceived social support(including perceived social support in real life and network),depression level,demographic variables.This part focuses on the analysis of the basic attributes of members,the relationship between perceived social support of the members and their degree of integration of Tieba use as well as their depression level,in order to analyze whether and to what extent depression Baidu Tieba has positive significance for depressed patients.This is based on the patient’s own subjective perspective;3.Thirdly,according to the previous interviews,I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders of this virtual community(mainly divided into two dimensions of leaders and assistant leaders).Combined with their personal experience and daily work practice,I analyze how the service team provides social support for community members.Finally,at the basis of the three mutually supportive results above,I summarize the logic and structure of social support system of depression Baidu Tieba.Combining with the current social support provision status of major depression offline and online communities in China,this paper tries to put forward some ideas about the whole work. |
