Social Support and Eating Disorders on Instagram: Communication Patterns Amongst Users in the Eating Disorder Recovery Community
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- It is important to address the increasing growth of a group of people turning to social media to express a stigmatized facet of their identity: their eating disorder. This research focuses on the accounts of people using Instagram as a tool for eating disorder recovery. Instagram provides users the opportunity to disclose sensitive information about their eating disorder recovery experiences, and users can respond in ways that may provide the posters with social support and positive validation in their recovery. I conducted a linguistic analysis of 300 posts within the eating disorder recovery community. I analyzed the language in the posts themselves, the language in the comments received by the post, and the relationship between certain types of posts and their associated comments. Results indicate that discourse of the eating disorder recovery community on Instagram is overwhelmingly positive, demonstrating that users find support and encouragement when disclosing sensitive information about their experiences on Instagram. Posts that are higher in positive tone also receive more positive comments, while posts that are longer, higher in narrative style, higher in clout and confident language, and more authentic receive longer responses. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 5, 2017 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Harriman, Maggie |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Hancock, Jeff |
Subjects
| Subject | Communications |
|---|---|
| Subject | Media Studies |
| Subject | Coterminal Masters Program |
| Subject | eating disorders |
| Subject | social media |
| Subject | |
| Subject | language |
| Subject | psychological well-being |
| Subject | social support |
| Subject | self-disclosure |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Harriman, M.P. (2017).Social Support and Eating Disorders on Instagram: Communication Patterns Amongst Users in the Eating Disorder Recovery Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.
Collection
Masters Theses in Media Studies, Department of Communication, Stanford University
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- Contact
- mpharrim@stanford.edu
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