Knowledge of legal rights as a factor of refugee and asylum seekers' health status: a qualitative study.

Objectives: To examine health behaviours of refugees and asylum seekers, in relation to their knowledge of public benefits and legal rights.

Design: Qualitative study, utilising an open-ended, semi-structured interview guide to ensure information-rich data collection. Thematic content was analysed using qualitative research software.

Social media and close relationships: a puzzle of connection and disconnection.

Social media and well-being have been a subject of intense debate in research, policy, and the popular press. In this review, we discuss social media use and well-being in the context of close relationships, including romantic partners, friends, and family, by drawing on research that connects social media use to both relational connection and relational disconnection. In an effort to disentangle a puzzle of connection and disconnection, we argue for the duality of social media effects in close relationships in which behaviors that facilitate connection and disconnection are intertwined.

Investigating Self-injury Support Solicitations and Responses on a Mobile Peer Support Application.

Online informal support networks may provide a critical source of support for young people who self-injure. While these platforms are often intended to mitigate digital harm, there is limited understanding of how individuals use peer support venues to seek self-injury related support and the specific contingencies of supportive exchanges. The present mixed-methods study was designed to explore the types of concerns members express on a mobile peer support application and the types of responses that they receive.

Examining the Relationship Between the Use of a Mobile Peer-Support App and Self-Injury Outcomes: Longitudinal Mixed Methods Study.

Background: Many individuals who self-injure seek support and information through online communities and mobile peer-support apps. Although researchers have identified risks and benefits of participation, empirical work linking participation in these web-based spaces to self-injury behaviors and thoughts is limited.

Objective: This study aims to investigate the relationship between behavioral and linguistic traces on a mobile peer support app and self-injury outcomes.

How Older Adults with Chronic Pain Manage Social Support Interactions with Mobile Media.

Mobile media offer new ways for older adults to access and interact with their social support networks. While mobile media usage has been increasing among older adults, less is known about why older adults with chronic pain prefer to select members of their existing social network for quality social support interactions, what types of communication mechanisms they engage in when utilizing mobile media, and how they use their mobile media to manage their interactions and relationships. The analysis of 25 semi-structured interviews with older adults with chronic pain reveals that a sense of camaraderie and shared meaning of pain experiences underlie their preferences for communicating with similar others about chronic pain.

Towards an integration of individualistic, networked, and institutional approaches to online disclosure and privacy in a networked ecology.

In this paper, we review three different approaches to disclosure and privacy: a) an individualistic approach, which emphasizes an individual's control over information access and flow, b) a networked approach focused on information flow in horizontal relations between people, and c) an institutional approach concerned with public and societal privacy risks from platforms, providers, and governments. These approaches co-exist largely independently of each other in privacy and disclosure literature. However, with overlapping public and private spheres of communication where a presumption of individual agency over personal information is no longer tenable, we argue for the importance of bridging these perspectives towards a more multifaceted view on online disclosure and privacy in a networked ecology.

Psychological Distress and Emotional Expression on Facebook.

Social network sites (SNS) are a novel social environment for college students with psychological distress to connect with their peers, but the nature and effects of these interactions are not well understood. This study reports findings from a Facebook study among 238 college students reporting nonspecific psychological distress using the K-6 scale. Behavioral data included Facebook status updates containing affect words written by participants within the past 60 days and the number of responses (comments and likes) each update received.

Automatic Archiving versus Default Deletion: What Snapchat Tells Us About Ephemerality in Design.

Unlike most social media, where automatic archiving of data is the default, Snapchat defaults to ephemerality: deleting content shortly after it is viewed by a receiver. Interviews with 25 Snapchat users show that ephemerality plays a key role in shaping their practices. Along with friend-adding features that facilitate a network of mostly close relations, default deletion affords everyday, mundane talk and reduces self-consciousness while encouraging playful interaction.

Managing Stigma: Disclosure-Response Communication Patterns in Pro-Anorexic Websites.

Pro-anorexic websites are a popular online venue for individuals with anorexia, but recent research suggests that they play a role of "online negative enabling support groups" because they can undermine recovery and encourage negative behaviors by validating pro-anorexic views. By analyzing 22,811 messages from 5,590 conversations from the Pro-Ana Nation online discussion board forum, this study examines communicative mechanisms of online negative enabling support through language analysis of disclosure-response sequences, changes in the language of the initial discloser within an interaction exchange, and the role of responses in eliciting those changes. The findings show that initiating disclosures containing stigma-related emotion words, anorexia-specific content, and sociorelational content are typically met with negatively valenced responses from other members of the pro-anorexic community.

Age Differences in Online Social Networking: Extending Socioemotional Selectivity Theory to Social Network Sites.

This article extends socioemotional selectivity theory to online social networking by examining age differences in the size and composition of Facebook networks across a wide age range of Facebook users (18 to 93 years old) in a nationally representative sample. Findings suggest increasing selectivity of Facebook social partners with age. Compared to younger adults, friend networks of older adults are smaller but contain a greater proportion of individuals who are considered to be actual friends.