‘Aorta tell you’: Exploring a facebook group for heart disease and its potential to generate knowledge from collective experience

• Main Author: Parrocha, Azer N.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Social media; Communication in medicine; Cardiovascular system—Diseases; Communities of practice; Online chat groups; Film and Media Studies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_comm/3; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=etdm_comm
• Institution: De La Salle University

Recent work on health and disease-specific Facebook groups focus on pros and cons, but not often understood is how members develop new knowledge through their interactions. This thesis presents how a private Facebook group for cardiovascular disease (CVD) is used by Filipino patients and family caregivers as a Community of Practice for coping with illness by determining the digital coping activities they learned from and with each other and how these activities are put into practice by combining theoretical insights of the Digital Coping Model and Community of Practice. Drawing on in-depth and semi-structured interviews from participants, this thesis found that delaying medical care exacerbates distresses, group chats’ affordances motivate openness in sharing, praying encourages better management of illness, and “knowing otherwise” sustains the group. Taken together, results provide a nuanced understanding of how a Facebook group can help its members cope with illness by generating new knowledge from members’ collective experience. This thesis shows how sustained value can be built by developing practices from accumulated experiences which in turn establish a common baseline of experiential/lay-knowledge. A health-themed podcast was created to summarize participants’ experiences in coping with illness and ways to improve them.