What did we do?

At the beginning of the project, the iPOF team published a detailed research plan. The plan included 3 parts, called work packages. In work package 1, the team searched online for existing evidence about mental health peer support forums. This evidence was combined with interviews with forum staff to create initial programme theories about how online forums might work.

In work package 2, the initial programme theories were tested and refined using a range of research methods. This included interviews and surveys with forums users, and linguistic analysis of forum users’ actual forum posts.

In work package 3, the co-design group used their personal experiences of forums to help inform the study. In the early stages, this included setting priorities for which areas the research team should focus on and assisting with the design of key study materials, like the survey. As the study progressed, the co-design group helped to create practical tools to improve online forums, including a video about what forums offer, an online training course for moderators, and guidance for how to design forums effectively.

There are complex ethical challenges involved with doing research on online mental health forums. Before the study started, the iPOF the team published a detailed ethics framework and received ethical approval from a UK NHS Research Ethics Committee. We also wrote a paper reflecting on the ethical and methodological challenges of researching online spaces.

A link to the ethics paper will appear here, when it is published