Psychology Commons^™

Expanded Behavioral Model For Online Support Services, Laura Boxley

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

The rapid expansion of online technologies and health resources has created opportunities to develop broadly available interventions to address the needs of the modern patient. This study proposes a theoretical structure based on Andersen's Individual Determinants of Health Service Utilization Model to describe who is using online support and how it is being used. Also unique to this analysis was the use of objective behavioral data to describe and predict website utilization, and linguistic analysis to evaluate the content of what is shared in online groups. Eighty-four men and women completed baseline evaluations and were randomized into either online support …