Background: Online health forums provide peer support for a range of medical conditions, including
life-threatening and terminal illnesses. Trust is an important component of peer-to-peer support,
although relatively little is known about how trust forms within online health forums.
Objective: The aim of this paper is to examine how trust develops and influences sharing among
users of an online breast cancer forum.
Methods: An interpretive qualitative approach was adopted. Data were collected from forum posts
from 135 threads on nine boards on the UK charity, Breast Cancer Care (BCC). Semi-structured
interviews were conducted with 14 BCC forum users. Both datasets were analysed thematically using
Braun and Clarke’s [2006] approach and combined to triangulate analysis.
Results: Trust operates in three dimensions, structural, relational and temporal, which intersect with
each other and do not operate in isolation. The structural dimension relates to how the affordances
and formal rules of the site affected trust. The relational dimension refers to how trust was
necessarily experienced in interactions with other forum users: it emerged within relationships and
was a social phenomenon. The temporal dimension relates to how trust changed over time and was
influenced by the length of time users spent on the forum.
Conclusions: Trust is a process that changes over time, and which is influenced by structural features
of the forum and informal but collectively understood relational interactions among forum users.
The study provides a better understanding of how the intersecting structural, relational and
temporal aspects that support the development of trust facilitate sharing in online environments.
These findings will help organisations developing online health forums.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)