How an Online Health Support Community Responded to the COVID-19 Crisis.

The scope and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges for people seeking health information online. To understand how an existing online community of people living with a chronic health condition navigate meeting their existing health goals alongside the challenges and tensions resulting from COVID-19, we performed a qualitative content analysis of six weeks of discussion in the r/infertility online community. We found that community members collaborated and debated to make dynamic structural and normative changes to their community in accordance with the changing impacts of COVID-19 on their experiences. Additionally, we found that community members information-seeking goals were centered around timelines for their own treatment plans and goals, with the scope of these timelines shifting based on their current state of knowledge of COVID-19. Implications of these findings for supporting health online communities broadly are discussed. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.