The effect of grief on HIV patients' need for informational and emotional support

We apply stage theory of grief to study how HIV/AIDS patients' emotional states affect their social support seeking behavior (i) in online communities. We propose that support seekers (i) have different preferences for informational and emotional support as they experience different emotional states. Other members of the community (j) also base their response on the self-expressed emotion of the support seekers (i). We conducted text mining of posts by HIV patients on Poz.com. Linguistic analysis and word count (LIWC) is used to measure the key emotional states of support seekers, information value and emotional value of the posts. As hypothesized, we found that patients who are in the early stages of grief with an emotional state of disbelief seek more informational support, and also receive more informational support from other members. Patients in later stages of grief including those experiencing emotional states of anger and depression are more likely to seek emotional support, and are also likely to receive emotional support. Patients in the yearning stage have the lowest support seeking behavior of all patients, and receive little support in return. This study contributes by showing that patients' need for informational and emotional support is not a static process, their need for a particular type of social support can be changing as they cope with the disease.