Studying gratitude practices and expressions in an online community.
A small introduction
I was introduced to the Gratitude project as a co-lead for the UI/UX Design team for the Tech4GoodLab and have been involved with doing design and research related work up until its publication as a research poster for CSCW'23. Everything I mention in this case study mainly relates to the work I did during Spring of 2023.
Negative associations within online communities
Online communities are often criticized for associations with decreased mental well-being, reduced in person social connections, increased depression, and the spread of misinformation.
Benefits of gratitude in online communities
Prior research has demonstrated that grateful reflection, along with expressing and receiving gratitude, is associated with improved well-being and prosocial behaviors that cultivate a sense of relatedness and member engagement. Cultivating gratitude within online communities can lead to the development of a "gratitude cycle" framework which models how expressing gratitude towards other members of a community can lead to continuous reciprocal expressions of altruistic behavior and gratitude.
Makri, S., & Turner, S. (2019). “I can’t express my thanks enough”: The “Gratitude cycle” in online communities. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(5), 503–515. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24257
How might we best design prosocial online communities centered on gratitude?
Observations from previous research insights on gratitude's effect in online communities led us to wonder how we could conduct formative research to learn more about creating prosocial online communities. Our goal is to study user reactions for an online gratitude based platform to inform our process for a potential future study uncovering insights into designing pro-social online communities.
Early reactions towards expressing gratitude in an online community
To inform the design of our full study, we conducted a brief pilot study, which we called a protostudy, in which we conducted 30 minute long semi-structured interviews to gather qualitative data from representative users on their current experiences with social media, online communities, and gratitude practices. In addition, we also asked interviewees about their views and expectations for communal gratitude practices.
Interview Themes
After conducting our interviews, we recorded and analyzed our findings through affinity mapping and thematic analysis to uncover research themes and insights.
Gratitude - A simple gratitude-sharing platform for online communities
Our research team designed and developed Gratitude, a simple community-based platform, as a digital tool to promote practices of gratitude and study early user impressions on expressing gratitude in an online community.
Users see weekly gratitude prompts, community decks they can contribute to, and journal entries of past gratitude notes written.
Community decks consist of gratitude notes that users can browse and react to.
We plan on conducting a future study utilizing the Gratitude platform as a digital tool to better understand what values and motivations users have when posting on an online communal platform.
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