Catching online patient exchanges: a tool proposal.

It’s well established that online exchanges are becoming more and more central for processes of peer knowledge sharing and construction. This is really true for the health management and care, in particular for the chronic conditions; indeed, chronic patients are the experts of their illness, yet scientific knowledge does not translate well into meaningful lay knowledge from which patients can make decisions about daily care management of their illness. So they turn to the Internet and especially to the online peer exchanges (e.g.: social networks) to find more information about their condition, to seek support from other patients and more and more to share and construct together useful knowledge for their health management: in practice patient share experiences, information and practical solutions that help them to learn a better care management. However, the study of online knowledge sharing and construction between chronic patients is difficult as it brings together a variety of concepts, methods and tools not uniformly shared or understood across disciplines. Moreover, these exchanges are usually used as a source of information and contents, but less attention is given to the way in which people exchange and construct these contents: this means not only to consider group and conversation dynamics, but also to be able to understand how the growing richness of the online contexts is modifying the exchange possibilities (online exchanges and knowledge construction processes are not just written texts!). Since there are not shared tools to comprehensively study these processes, the aim of this work is to present a grid for the analysis of the online patients peer exchanges that comprehends: - contents: written texts, but also the use of pictures and videos and the role of links; - group dynamics; - conversational and discourse processes (considering online conversation as an hybrid between written and oral conversations); - knowledge and support sharing and construction processes; - social presence and subjectivity construction processes. As its explorative and naturalistic nature, this is a qualitative tool in part developed by theory and in part, inductively developed from the initial analysis of online chronic patients exchanges. The analysis was organized using ATLAS.Ti software.