Dr. Kuang-Yuan Huang, CIS
There are two goals of the proposed research. First, we will continue our ICR-funded research on analyzing the big data collected from a large cannabis online support forum. Specifically, the goal is to analyze the social network data constructed from the social interaction history among cannabis quitters in the online support forum. Since there are several hundreds of thousands of discussion threads on the forum, the resulting data will be large in volume and contains useful social information for analysis.
These findings will have impacts both on research and practice, in that they provide understandings of online social support seeking and provision behaviors of cannabis quitters, and that they provide guidance on the design of online cannabis support forums conducive of social support exchange. The second goal is to create a practical mobile application to assist cannabis rehabilitation based on our research findings from FY18.
The research in FY18 studied the inter-relationships between online support seekers’ emotion states and the social support they received from other members of an online cannabis support forum. The results of FY18-19 can be included into the design of a mobile application to facilitate cannabis rehabilitation. This application will be equipped with expert knowledge regarding different social support types appropriate for a given difficulty experienced by cannabis quitters. We are planning to design, develop, and demonstrate the online/mobile app to be used by cannabis users for further data collection.