Mental health Mental and Behavioural Disorders
Conditions
Interventions
The study is divided into 3 workstreams
Workstream 1 is a realist synthesis. The aim is to develop theories about how online forums for mental health work. This will be done by synthesising stakeholde
Sponsors
Lancaster University
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
13 Years to 100 Years
Inclusion criteria
Inclusion criteria: Participating forums must: 1. Focus on supporting mental health 2. Be UK based 3. Aim to support young people or adults and/or be able to extract data from people aged 16 years old and over 4. Be hosted by a healthcare provider, charity, or commercial organisation 5. Sign up to a data sharing agreement consistent with the procedures outlined in this document 6. Not have anything in terms and conditions that would prohibit the use of data for research Participating posts must: Posts from all forum users aged 13 years old and over are eligible for analysis Participating in the survey: All users over the age of 16 years participating in forums will be eligible for the survey Participating in interviews: All users, moderators and hosts of participating forums, plus other stakeholders who can contribute expertise to the development and testing of programme theories will be eligible for the interviews
Exclusion criteria
Exclusion criteria: Current participant exclusion criteria as of 04/11/2022: 1. People living outside the UK 2. Forums hosting data outside the UK or EU 3. Aged 15 years old and under for interview and survey data Previous participant exclusion criteria: 1. People living outside the UK 2. Forums hosting data outside the UK 3. Aged 15 years old and under for interview and survey data
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| Current primary outcome measures as of 04/11/2022: Consistent with the realist approach, the exact outcomes and measures will be determined by the findings of the realist synthesis in phase 1 of the study. However, at the point of registration, we anticipate these will include: 1. Anxiety using the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7) 2. Mood using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) 3. Change using the Global Rating of Change measure 4. Use of services using an adapted version of the Client Service Receipt Schedule (CSRI) Outcomes will be measured using: 1. Online forum posts. We will use corpus linguistic methods to explore outcomes identifiable from what forum members say in their posts to the following timepoints: 1.1. First download and analysis of open, consented or fully anonymised posts from April 2022 to January 2023 1.2. Second download and analysis of posts (from March 2016 to March 2023) to analyse (March 2023 to May 2023) 1.3. Third download and analysis of posts (since the last download from March 2024 to September 2024) 2. Online surveys with three waves of data collection at sign-up and 6 and 12 weeks later, starting from February 2023- January 2024 3. Interviews with forum members, moderators and hosts. We will sample across use levels and explore in-depth positive and negative impacts. Previous primary outcome measures: Consistent with the realist approach, the exact outcomes and measures will be determined by the findings of the realist synthesis in phase 1 of the study. However, at the point of registration, we anticipate these will include: 1. Anxiety using the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7) 2. Mood using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) 3. Change using the Global Rating of Change measure 4. Use of services using an adapted version of the Client Service Receipt Schedule (CSRI) Outcomes will be measured using: 1. Online forum posts. We will use corpus linguistic methods to explore outcomes identif | — |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| There are no secondary outcome measures | — |
Countries
England, United Kingdom
Contacts
Public ContactGeneral Enquires
Outcome results
None listed