Despite its importance for well-being, spiritual care remains under-explored in HCI, while the adoption of technology in clinical spiritual care lags behind other healthcare fields. Prior work derived a definition of "spiritual support" through co-design workshops with stakeholders in online health communities. This paper contributes: (1) a revision of that definition through member checking with professional spiritual care providers (SCPs); (2) a novel design framework—SPIRIT—which can help to expand models of delivery for spiritual care using digital technologies. Through re-analysis of previous data and new interviews with SCPs, we identify three prerequisites for meaningful spiritual care: openness to care, safe space, and the ability to discern and articulate spiritual needs. We also propose six design dimensions: loving presence, meaning-making, appropriate degree of technology use, location, degree of relational closeness, and temporality. We discuss how SPIRIT offers guidance for designing impactful digital spiritual care intervention systems within and beyond clinical settings.

Despite a growing need for spiritual care in the US, it is often under-served, inaccessible, or misunderstood, while almost no prior work in CSCW/HCI research has engaged with professional chaplains and spiritual care providers. This interdisciplinary study aims to develop a foundational understanding of how spiritual care may (or may not) be expanded into online spaces--especially focusing on anonymous, asynchronous, and text-based online communities. We conducted an exploratory mixed-methods study with chaplains (N=22) involving interviews and user testing sessions centered around Reddit support communities to understand participants' perspectives on technology and their ideations about the role of chaplaincy in prospective Online Spiritual Care Communities (OSCCs). Our Grounded Theory Method analysis highlighted benefits of OSCCs including: meeting patients where they are at; accessibility and scalability; and facilitating patient-initiated care. Chaplains highlighted how their presence in OSCCs could help with shaping peer interactions, moderation, synchronous chats for group care, and redirecting to external resources, while also raising important feasibility concerns, risks, and needs for future design and research. We used an existing taxonomy of chaplaincy techniques to show that some spiritual care strategies may be amenable to online spaces, yet we also exposed the limitations of technology to fully mediate spiritual care and the need to develop new online chaplaincy interventions. Based on these findings, we contribute the model of a ''Care Loop'' between institutionally-based formal care and platform-based community care to expand access and drive greater awareness and utilization of spiritual care. We also contribute design implications to guide future work in online spiritual care.

Because of the rapid development and increasing public availability of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) models and tools, educational institutions and educators must immediately reckon with the impact of students using GenAI. There is limited prior research on computing students' use and perceptions of GenAI. In anticipation of future advances and evolutions of GenAI, we capture a snapshot of student attitudes towards and uses of yet emerging GenAI, in a period of time before university policies had reacted to these technologies. We surveyed all computer science majors in a small engineering-focused R1 university in order to: (1) capture a baseline assessment of how GenAI has been immediately adopted by aspiring computer scientists; (2) describe computing students' GenAI-related needs and concerns for their education and careers; and (3) discuss GenAI influences on CS pedagogy, curriculum, culture, and policy. We present an exploratory qualitative analysis of this data and discuss the impact of our findings on the emerging conversation around GenAI and education.

Humans need a sense of community (SOC), and social media platforms afford opportunities to address this need by providing users with a sense of virtual community (SOVC). This paper explores SOVC on Reddit and is motivated by two goals: (1) providing researchers with an excellent resource for methodological decisions in studies of Reddit communities; and (2) creating the foundation for a new class of research methods and community support tools that reflect users' experiences of SOVC. To ensure that methods are respectfully and ethically designed in service and accountability to impacted communities, our work takes a qualitative and community-centered approach by engaging with two key stakeholder groups. First, we interviewed 21 researchers to understand how they study community" on Reddit. Second, we surveyed 12 subreddits to gain insight into user experiences of SOVC. Results show that some research methods can broadly reflect user experiences of SOVC regardless of the topic or type of subreddit. However, user responses also evidenced the existence of five distinct Community Archetypes: Topical Q&A, Learning & Perspective Broadening, Social Support, Content Generation, and Affiliation with an Entity. We offer the Community Archetypes framework to support future work in designing methods that align more closely with user experiences of SOVC and to create community support tools that can meaningfully nourish the human need for SOC/SOVC in our modern world.

Despite frequent efforts to combat racism, almost no research has explored how to cultivate positive experiences of thriving Black culture on Reddit. In this case study, we surveyed users of r/BlackPeopleTwitter (BPT)--a large, popular subreddit that showcases screenshots of hilarious or insightful social media posts made by Black people (mainly from Black Twitter). Our research questions seek to understand users' motivations for visiting BPT, how they experience a sense of virtual community (SOVC) and membership in BPT, and how BPT's governance influences these experiences. We find that that users come to BPT primarily for excellent humor and entertainment, sociopolitical context on issues relevant to Black people, and/or partaking in the shared Black experience. Black users are more likely to report higher SOVC and to identify as members, whereas non-Black users are more likely to identify as guests or visitors to the community. To protect Black expression, the BPT moderation team implemented a governance strategy for verifying racial identity and limiting participation to only verified users in certain threads. Our data suggest that this policy is a contentious but influential aspect of SOVC that simultaneously constructs and challenges the sense of the subreddit existing as a safe space for Black people. We synthesize these results by discussing how: differing platform affordances across Twitter and Reddit combine to cultivate a thriving Black community on Reddit; the need for Black authenticity on an otherwise anonymous platform can guide future research in identity verification; and the limitations of this study motivate future work to support all marginalized communities online.

Following Facebook's introduction of the "Like" in 2009, CaringBridge (a nonprofit health journaling platform) implemented a "Heart" symbol as a single-click reaction affordance in 2012. In 2016, Facebook expanded its Like into a set of emotion-based reactions. In 2021, CaringBridge likewise added three new reactions: "Prayer", "Happy", and "Sad." Through user surveys (N=808) and interviews (N=13), we evaluated this product launch. Unlike Likes on mainstream social media, CaringBridge's single-click Heart was consistently interpreted as a simple, meaningful expression of acknowledgement and support. Although most users accepted the new reactions, the product launch transformed user perceptions of the feature and ignited major disagreement regarding the meanings and functions of reactions in the high stakes context of health crises. Some users found the new reactions to be useful, convenient, and reducing of caregiver burden; others felt they cause emotional harms by stripping communication of meaningful expression and authentic care. Overall, these results surface tensions for small social media platforms that need to survive amidst giants, as well as highlighting crucial trade-offs between the cognitive effort, meaningfulness, and efficiency of different forms of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Our work provides three contributions to support researchers and designers in navigating these tensions: (1) empirical knowledge of how users perceived the reactions launch on CaringBridge; (2) design implications for improving health-focused CMC; and (3) concrete questions to guide future research into reactions and health-focused CMC.

Bots are increasingly being used for governance-related purposes in online communities, yet no instrumentation exists for measuring how users assess their beneficial or detrimental impacts. In order to support future human-centered and community-based research, we developed a new scale called GOVernance Bots in Online communiTies (GOV-BOTs) across two rounds of surveys on Reddit (N=820). We applied rigorous psychometric criteria to demonstrate the validity of GOV-BOTs, which contains two subscales: bot governance (4 items) and bot tensions (3 items). Whereas humans have historically expected communities to be composed entirely of humans, the social participation of bots as non-human agents now raises fundamental questions about psychological, philosophical, and ethical implications. Addressing psychological impacts, our data show that perceptions of effective bot governance positively contribute to users' sense of virtual community (SOVC), whereas perceived bot tensions may only impact SOVC if users are more aware of bots. Finally, we show that users tend to experience the greatest SOVC across groups of subreddits, rather than individual subreddits, suggesting that future research should carefully re-consider uses and operationalizations of the term "community."

Structured data peer production (SDPP) platforms like Wikidata play an important role in knowledge production. Compared to traditional peer production platforms like Wikipedia, Wikidata data is more structured and intended to be used by machines, not (directly) by people; end-user interactions with Wikidata often happen through intermediary "invisible machines." Given this distinction, we wanted to understand Wikidata contributor motivations and how they are affected by usage invisibility caused by the machine intermediaries. Through an inductive thematic analysis of 15 interviews, we find that: (i) Wikidata editors take on two archetypes---Architects who define the ontological infrastructure of Wikidata, and Masons who build the database through data entry and editing; (ii) the structured nature of Wikidata reveals novel editor motivations, such as an innate drive for organizational work; (iii) most Wikidata editors have little understanding of how their contributions are used, which may demotivate some. We synthesize these insights to help guide the future design of SDPP platforms in supporting the engagement of different types of editors.

Spirituality is an understudied topic in social computing; however, for Online Health Community (OHC) users facing life-threatening illness, it is of fundamental importance. Through in-depth focus groups with OHC stakeholders in a US context, we derive a definition of "spiritual support" for use by designers and researchers who study online social support. We show that spiritual support is an integral dimension that underlies other social support types, and that if we ignore spirituality in design, we fail to mitigate problematic issues that arise in online spaces when users' spiritual values clash. Based on participants' ideations, we provide design implications for OHCs and other social media to better facilitate spiritual support through: (1) representing spiritual beliefs, (2) assistance with supportive communication, (3) support network visualization and mobilization, and (4) advance care planning and digital legacy.

Online technologies offer great promise to expand models of delivery for therapeutic interventions to help users cope with increasingly common mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. For example, "cognitive reappraisal" is a skill that involves changing one's perspective on negative thoughts in order to improve one's emotional state. In this work, we present Flip*Doubt, a novel crowd-powered web application that provides users with cognitive reappraisals ("reframes") of negative thoughts. A one-month field deployment of Flip*Doubt with 13 graduate students yielded a data set of negative thoughts paired with positive reframes, as well as rich interview data about how participants interacted with the system. Through this deployment, our work contributes: (1) an in-depth qualitative understanding of how participants used a crowd-powered cognitive reappraisal system in the wild; and (2) detailed codebooks that capture informative context about negative input thoughts and reframes. Our results surface data-derived hypotheses that may help to explain what types of reframes are helpful for users, while also providing guidance to future researchers and developers interested in building collaborative systems for mental health. In our discussion, we outline implications for systems research to leverage peer training and support, as well as opportunities to integrate AI/ML-based algorithms to support the cognitive reappraisal task. (Note: This paper includes potentially triggering mentions of mental health issues and suicide.)

Mass media afford researchers critical opportunities to disseminate research findings and trends to the general public. Yet researchers also perceive that their work can be miscommunicated in mass media, thus generating unintended understandings of HCI research by the general public. We conduct a Grounded Theory analysis of interviews with 12 HCI researchers and find that miscommunication can occur at four origins along the socio-technical infrastructure known as the Media Production Pipeline (MPP) for science news. Results yield researchers' perceived hazards of disseminating their work through mass media, as well as strategies for fostering effective communication of research. We conclude with implications for augmenting or innovating new MPP technologies.

On Wikipedia, sophisticated algorithmic tools are used to assess the quality of edits and take corrective actions. However, algorithms can fail to solve the problems they were designed for if they conflict with the values of communities who use them. In this study, we take a Value-Sensitive Algorithm Design approach to understanding a community-created and -maintained machine learning-based algorithm called the Objective Revision Evaluation System (ORES)---a quality prediction system used in numerous Wikipedia applications and contexts. Five major values converged across stakeholder groups that ORES (and its dependent applications) should: (1) reduce the effort of community maintenance, (2) maintain human judgement as the final authority, (3) support differing peoples' differing workflows, (4) encourage positive engagement with diverse editor groups, and (5) establish trustworthiness of people and algorithms within the community. We reveal tensions between these values and discuss implications for future research to improve algorithms like ORES.

Instrumental support is critical for patients and family caregivers facing life-threatening illnesses, injuries, or chronic conditions (e.g., cancer). We partner with CaringBridge.org—a prominent online health community for journaling about health crises—to conduct a study of instrumental support in the following two phases: a content analysis of 641 journal updates; and a survey of 991 users. Quantitative results show that: (1) patients and family caregivers prefer to receive different types of support than their care networks prefer to provide; (2) people generally have more trust in their closest social connections than acquaintances or businesses to provide instrumental support; and (3) users rate “prayer support” as the most important support category to them. Building on these results, we discuss design implications to accommodate divergent preferences and to expand instrumental support networks. We also discuss the need for future work to empower family caregivers and to support spirituality, an understudied topic in HCI.

Contemporary scientific media production requires a complex socio-technical infrastructure we call the "Media Production Pipeline" (MPP). Media professionals engage with researchers along the MPP to disseminate science news to the lay public. However, differing incentive structures and professional contexts frequently set researchers' values and needs at odds with those of media professionals, resulting in problematic or failed interactions. We ask the research question: what pain points in scientific media production afford opportunities for future HCI innovation? We then present a grounded theory analysis of 24 interviews with researchers and media professionals, yielding several key contributions. First, we describe two collaborative domains in scientific media production between research advocates and media outlets. Second, we characterize discrete technological gaps and pain points in both domains. Finally, we discuss implications for design and propose solutions from HCI areas like peer production, online communities, recommender systems, and online collaboration.

Expressive writing has been shown to improve physical, mental, and social health outcomes for patients struggling with difficult diagnoses. In many online health communities, writing comprises a substantial portion of the user experience, yet little work has explored how writing itself affects user engagement. This paper explores user engagement on CaringBridge, a prominent online community for writing about personal health journeys. We build a survival analysis model, defining a new set of variables that operationalize expressive writing, and comparing these effects to those of social support, which are well-known to benefit user engagement. Furthermore, we use machine learning methods to estimate that approximately one third of community members who self-identify with a cancer condition cease engagement due to literal death. Finally, we provide quantitative evidence that: (1) receiving support, expressive writing, and giving support, in decreasing magnitude of relative impact, are associated with user engagement on CaringBridge, and (2) that considering deceased sites separately in our analysis significantly shifts our interpretations of user behavior.