Egg providers have the right to complete and accurate information about egg donation before deciding to donate. Many seek information beyond clinics and agencies, relying on fertility clinic or agency websites and testimonials of (former) egg providers. While several studies have examined fertility clinic websites, online narratives from experienced egg providers remain largely unexplored. This study analyzes how egg providers narrate their experiences in online blogs. A systematic online search was conducted between August 2021 and September 2023 to identify blogs written by egg providers and published independently from clinics and agencies. This resulted in 23 blogs that were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis combined with interdisciplinary collaborative auditing. The bloggers contributed to the creation of a community where (prospective) egg providers could inform and support each other. Comparable to travel guides that provide comprehensive repositories of information, the bloggers encouraged their readers interested in egg donation to further explore and consider the option with informed awareness of the possible risks and negative outcomes and to advocate for themselves. Decisions to stop donating were detailed with extensive thought and explanation, while decisions to donate again were described as the default choice. In providing information about egg donation and encouraging others to donate, the bloggers often took on the role of peer recruiters. Bloggers' lived experiences provide insights often missing from clinical sources, complementing medical facts with the everyday, embodied realities of egg donation. However, the blogs also showed patterns that reflect the notion of gendered altruism, where egg providers feel a deep, sometimes self-sacrificial, responsibility to intended parents lived experiences provide inrents. Given that the bloggers actively encouraged their readers to donate, the notion of complicity warrants further examination in this context.
The goal of this study is to investigate the variables that may predict Serbian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' acceptance of blogs for language learning purposes. Despite widespread support of the use of blog in EFL education, empirical research on EFL teachers' adoption of blog in Serbia is scarce. Building on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study extends the model by incorporating subjective norm (SN), referring to perceived social pressure from colleagues and important others, as a key external factor influencing blog acceptance. On the basis of the TAM, mutual relationships of six variables were examined: SN, attitude towards blog use, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, behavioural intention (BI), and actual use of blog in teaching practice (USE). Structural equation modelling was used for testing the hypothesized model with data obtained from 300 primary school EFL teachers in Serbia. The proposed model had a good fit for explaining EFL teachers' BI and USE, and accounted for 25.4% of the variance in USE and 70.9% of the variance in BI. The results highlight the substantial role of SN, which significantly influenced teachers' perceptions of usefulness, ease of use, attitudes, and BI. The findings also reveal a gap between teachers' intentions to use blog and their actual classroom use. These results suggest that social and contextual influences play an important role in technology adoption, while positive intentions may not ensure actual integration of blog into teaching practice. The implications for theory and practice are addressed.
In the context of digital transformation, social media has become a key channel for the public to obtain health information, and bloggers play an important role in shaping public health behaviors. However, the internal mechanism of how PerceivedBloggers' Competence (PBC) and information characteristics jointly affect Information Adoption (IA) has not been fully revealed. This study integrates the Information Adoption Model (IAM) with Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) to examine the relationship between Perceived Bloggers' Competence and Information Adoption, and to explore how Perceived Bloggers' Competence moderates the impact of Information Quality (IQ) and Information Credibility (IC) on information adoption through Information Usefulness (IU). A total of 1219 participants (648 males and 571 females) were recruited using a cross-sectional online survey design. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS and AMOS. This study constructs a conceptual model with Information Usefulness as a mediator and perceived bloggers' competence as a moderating variable and employs path analysis along with moderating effect tests to verify the hypotheses. In the study, Information Quality and Information Credibility had significantly positive effects on Information Usefulness, which in turn strongly predicted Information Adoption, also Perceived Bloggers' Competence negatively moderates the relationship between information characteristics and adoption. This study challenges the assumption that bloggers' expertise necessarily promotes Information Adoption, also provides key insights for health communicators, showing that striking a balance between expertise and accessibility is essential for effective public health messaging on social media, exhibits an effect that can be called "competence discounting".
To explore how persons with cancer construct and socially position themselves in online blogs. Clarifying the discursive practice of self-construction can deepen healthcare professionals' understanding of how persons with cancer perceive themselves and their place in society. Mixed qualitative and quantitative design using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Online blogs active between 2015 and 2023 were evaluated. Google search with keywords: 'Blog about cancer' was conducted. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, following Fairclough's framework, was used to analyse data from four persons with cancer living in Norway. The analysis identified three discursive practices in which bloggers constructed themselves: a discourse of a person's existence, a discourse of norms, and a discourse of a paternalistic system. The bloggers constructed themselves as being trapped in their own bodies, changed and vulnerable individuals who should conform to the expected behaviours, and not being seen and heard by the healthcare system. The bloggers with cancer struggled between holistic and dualistic ideology, wishing to separate their bodies from themselves and constructed themselves as changed persons. Moreover, they struggled with societal expectations and adapted themselves to a paternalistic healthcare system, despite their desire to be seen and heard as individuals. This study investigated the experiences of patients living with cancer, offering valuable knowledge for nurses, other healthcare professionals, and the government. The study uncovered that persons with cancer constructed themselves as changed persons and felt vulnerable socially and within a paternalistic healthcare system. These results may provide a stimulus for further discussions on the patient roles in cancer treatment and how to meet their needs for care and treatment. This study adhered to the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR) guidelines. No patient or public contribution.
Circulating Now, the history of medicine blog for the National Library of Medicine (NLM), highlights blog posts written by community contributors. To evaluate the community represented within the blog, the project team explored how XQuery, a language for querying XML data, could be utilized in developing a dataset on institutions represented in the blog. The team used ChatGPT to develop the XQuery script and processed the queries through BaseX. The resulting data was transferred to Excel where additional data elements, such as geographic location and institutional type, were manually added. From this dataset, the team created visualizations in Tableau to show the over 400 unique institutions across the world represented. These visualizations supplemented an internal report for the Circulating Now Editorial Board, illustrating the current engagement reach of the blog and areas for future possible collaboration.
Academic research is not always available in a form that is accessible or engaging to a non-academic audience, hindering readers' engagement with it. Non-academics, even if highly educated and policy experts in their fields, tend to need research to be presented in a more accessible way than peer-reviewed articles - one example being non-technical blogs. However, writing these requires some effort from researchers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can make academic research easier to understand by summarizing and simplifying academic papers much more quickly than researchers can, making it easier for researchers to produce such summaries. However, disclosure of AI use may lower readers' perceived quality of and trust in the blog, generating a trade-off for the researcher. In this paper, we evaluate an 11-country experiment cross-randomizing a blog's actual and reported author as AI or human. We find that research stakeholders rate the quality of AI-generated blogs marginally lower than human-written ones (p [Formula: see text] 0.1), but disclosure of AI use offsets the negative effect (p [Formula: see text] 0.1). The study sample consists of policy-relevant stakeholders who typically engage with academic research; they are highly educated and include thematic specialists. Indeed, findings indicate that this audience interprets "accessibility" differently, preferring slightly more technical summaries of research. The nature of the respondents may thus explain the particular findings in this study, suggesting that researchers should tailor their prompts for their intended audience. There are no effects on readers' reported likelihood of engaging with the blog or on beliefs about others predicted engagement with it. Consequently, we hypothesize that researchers can leverage AI to communicate their research more easily without a penalty from disclosing its use.
We (Public Interest Group on Cancer Research) started a podcast and guest blog series on cancer in 2024. Our objective in this Commentary is to describe our experience with this series, insights gained, adjustments made to our approach, and our recommendations for future series. Our group identified and invited guests to contribute a blog or podcast episode on cancer, lived experience of cancer, cancer care and research, or advocacy. The podcast episodes were recorded using the WebEx platform (version 45.9.0.33069) and edited using the Kdenlive software (version 23.08.4). The blogs and podcasts were edited, finalized, and posted online for public access. In this manuscript, we utilized descriptive statistics to define and summarize information about the podcast episodes, guest blogs, and categorical responses to guest feedback survey questions, while we presented the responses to open-ended survey questions as quotes and summaries. As a result, during the period of January 2024-July 2025, we aired 28 podcast episodes and 13 guest blogs involving 36 guests. Guests included people from various backgrounds (such as people with lived experience, advocates, scientists, and healthcare providers) and members of equity-deserving communities (such as women, Indigenous and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities). We contemplated and learned as we proceeded with this project and implemented changes to address the issues that arose. In most cases the guests had positive experiences; however, in rare cases, university practices or federal policies prevented guest compensation, creating an unusual barrier. In conclusion, podcasting and blogging are practical public engagement instruments that provide space for sharing messages and knowledge to communicate with members of the public. Systematic barriers, such as policies that hamper guest compensation, need to be fixed for equitable participation, compensation, and engagement. As there is an increased interest in public engagement and knowledge mobilization activities, our learnings shared in this commentary may help other groups initiate or improve their public engagement practices.
The article analyses the medical blogosphere as a special digital space where new models of communication between physician and patient are formed. The relevance of research is conditioned by increasing role of digital media in health care, spreading of practices of independent search of medical information by patients and intensification of influence of social platforms on confidence and reputation of physician and decision-making regarding health. It is demonstrated that medical blogosphere performs simultaneously informational, educational, navigational and reputational functions. At the same time, the given space is associated with significant risks: dissemination of unreliable information, blurring of professional boundaries, threats to confidentiality and decreasing of quality of medical communication under absence of professional moderation. The thesis is substantiated that blogosphere does not replace clinical interaction, but becomes an important communicative contour that precedes, accompanies and continues full-time reception. The conclusion is made about necessity of institutionalization of professional presence of physicians in digital sphere, development of digital and media literacy in patients and elaboration of ethical standards of medical blogging. Статья посвящена анализу медицинской блогосферы как особого цифрового пространства, в котором формируются новые модели коммуникации между врачом и пациентом. Актуальность темы обусловлена ростом роли цифровых медиа в здравоохранении, распространением практик самостоятельного поиска медицинской информации пациентами и усилением влияния социальных платформ на доверие, репутацию врача и принятие решений в отношении здоровья. Показано, что медицинская блогосфера выполняет одновременно информационную, просветительскую, навигационную и репутационную функции. Вместе с тем данное пространство связано с существенными рисками: распространением недостоверной информации, размыванием профессиональных границ, угрозами конфиденциальности и снижением качества медицинской коммуникации при отсутствии профессиональной модерации. Обоснован тезис о том, что блогосфера не заменяет клиническое взаимодействие, но становится важным коммуникативным контуром, предваряющим, сопровождающим и продолжающим очный прием. Сделан вывод о необходимости институционализации профессионального присутствия врачей в цифровой среде, развития цифровой и медиаграмотности пациентов и выработки этических стандартов медицинского блогинга.
Background/Objectives: Palliative care nurses are at risk of burnout, trauma, and poor well-being. Expressive writing interventions are shown to promote self-reflection, personal growth, and resilience. A pilot study was designed to test the feasibility and use of a self-reflexive blog writing intervention to promote the subjective well-being, resilience, and personal growth of palliative care nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A sample of N = 144 registered nurses working in palliative care settings were enrolled in the study. Recruitment was performed using university alumni, nursing, and palliative care organization member listservs. Self-reported surveys such as the Subjective Well-Being Inventory (SUBI), Brief Resiliency Scale (BRS), and Post-traumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) scales were used to evaluate study outcomes. Pre- and post-surveys were obtained at baseline, 4 weeks, and 6 weeks. Upon baseline survey completion, participants were randomly assigned to control and intervention groups. Participants in the intervention group were asked to write two weekly blog entries for a period of four weeks using a blog template on Qualtrics software. Descriptive statistical measures were used to evaluate the study outcomes and content analysis to analyze descriptive survey responses and blog narratives. Results: A total of N = 57 participants completed this study. Most participants were females (93%), White (89.5%), married (93%), and full-time employees (96.5%) and underwent PC training (93%). The findings indicate significant improvement in the subjective well-being (MD = 2.43, p < 0.05) and resilience scores (MD = 0.244, p < 0.05) in the intervention group. No significant changes were found in post-traumatic growth scores post-intervention. Most participants found blog writing as a supportive tool to reflect on their personal experiences and to ventilate their emotions and feelings. Conclusions: Self-reflexive blog writing is convenient and a potentially effective method for promoting the resilience and well-being of nurses. Future studies are needed to evaluate its effectiveness in a larger sample across different practice settings.
Nowadays, tourism practices face increasingly intensified flows of people, making it imperative to explore the tourism space through the lens of mobility. To examine nationwide tourist mobility, this study collected online travel blog data from Qunar.com, a leading travel services platform in China, to construct tourist mobility networks across China. In these networks, attractions are represented as nodes, while tourist movements between them, derived from blog data, are represented as weighted and directed edges. To capture different travel contexts, the study also develops mobility networks categorized by departure season and travel partners. All networks are released in a simple, accessible format to support future research.
Public acceptance of gene editing remains an important consideration for the adoption of biotechnology in agriculture and medicine. This study presents findings from the final phase of a multi-stage research project designed to identify the communication strategies most effective at shaping public opinions on the safety of gene editing. A nationally recruited sample of 3,200 U.S. respondents participated in a randomized survey experiment. Participants were assigned to view one of eight videos developed from prior focus groups and three earlier surveys conducted as part of the broader research project. The videos varied across three communication attributes: messenger (researcher or blogger), message framing (emphasizing either the number of years of biotechnology use without adverse events or the number of studies demonstrating safety), and application context (agriculture or medicine). Between-subject analyses evaluated differences in communication effectiveness across treatment conditions, with outcomes focused on opinion change and knowledge retention. Respondents were generally receptive to the video interventions, suggesting that brief communication messages can influence perceptions of gene-editing safety. The application context of the video significantly affected knowledge retention, with respondents demonstrating stronger retention when the information aligned with the specific field emphasized in the communication. In contrast, differences in messenger type and message framing had comparatively limited effects on knowledge outcomes, suggesting that these communication features were less influential in shaping responses. These findings suggest that the context in which gene editing is presented may be more important than the specific messenger or message framing for communicating biotechnology safety to the public. The results offer practical insights for science communicators, industry stakeholders, and policymakers seeking to improve public understanding and acceptance of gene editing technologies across agricultural and medical applications.
Clinical investigators are increasingly interested in discovering computational biomarkers from short-term longitudinal omics datasets. This work focuses on Bayesian regression and variable selection for longitudinal omics datasets, which can estimate posterior evidence for each candidate biomarker and control false discovery using evidence thresholds. In our univariate approach, Zellner's g-prior is used with two different options of the tuning parameter g: g = n and a g that minimizes Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE). Bayes factors are used to rank metabolites by evidence, and their mapping to posterior model probabilities under prior odds can provide local posterior null probabilities whose average over the rejection set defines a Bayesian analogue of the global FDR. In the multivariate approach, we use Bayesian group lasso with a spike and slab prior for group variable selection. In both approaches, we use the first difference (Δ) scale of longitudinal predictor and the response. These methods work together to enhance our understanding of biomarker identification, improving inference and prediction. We compare our method against commonly used linear mixed effect models on simulated data and real data from a Tuberculosis (TB) study on metabolite biomarker selection. With an automated selection of hyperparameters, the Zellner's g-prior approach correctly identifies target metabolites with high specificity and sensitivity across various simulation and real data scenarios. The multivariate Bayesian group lasso spike and slab approach also correctly selects target metabolites across various simulation scenarios.
Cannamom culture (CMC), an online movement for acceptance of cannabis use among mothers, has gained traction on social media. The urgency for exploration of CMC in a Canadian context was enhanced through legalization of cannabis in 2018, followed by legalization of cannabis edibles in 2019. We sought to explore cannamoms' social media and blog posts, and their representations of cannabis use and motherhood. This qualitative study utilized reflexive thematic analysis of Canadian cannamom blog posts (N = 30) and Instagram posts (N = 34). Analysis of these outlets was considered through the lenses of similar social media phenomena, such as influencer, wine mom, wellness, and mental health cultural movements. The overarching theme identified was mothers marketing to mothers, with outlets advertising cannabis products and coaching. Three inter-related sub-themes were present within posts that facilitated this marketing: (1) a focus on increased normalization, attempted destigmatization, and legalization of cannabis due to its favorable health effects compared to other normalized substances; (2) responsible and personalized cannabis consumption to promote health and wellness; and (3) cannabis use as a way to achieve motherhood ideals including thinness, productivity, mental wellness, and engaged parenting. CMC spaces online reproduce intensive motherhood narratives and position cannabis as an acceptable solution to motherhood struggles. The focus on wellness and personalization draws on wellness movements by constructing cannabis consumption as natural, responsible, and health promoting. These findings have implications for policy makers and healthcare providers regarding mothers' understandings of cannabis use and health.
[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09473.].
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Despite the increasing number of patients receiving long-term invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) and the social importance of this issue, it is largely neglected in the public perception. One aim of the PRIVENT project was to raise public awareness of the issue. A team of physicians, health researchers, an art director and a scientific editor developed an information campaign, including blog posts, podcasts, social media posts and information for medical professionals or patients/their relatives and made them available to the public on a dedicated homepage and various social media platforms. The number of views was used to measure the reach of the campaign. In the period from 02/2021-03/2025, a total of 72 blog posts and 880 social media posts and 3 podcast seasons with 21 episodes were made available to the public. The total reach was 2.6 million, with Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn being the most used platforms with a total of 1872 followers. The most popular blog posts were those that explained the basics of IMV in plain language. Followers of the different social networks differ. Instagram users are younger and more likely to be female than those on Facebook and LinkedIn. Our analysis shows that social media can increase the visibility of long-term invasive mechanical ventilation and reach diverse audiences. Although visibility does not equate to awareness, these findings highlight the potential of social media to support broader communication about long-term IMV and weaning within the medical community and society. Trial registration number: The PRiVENT study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05260853) on 02/03/2022.
Generative AI tools are increasingly being used for creative and academic work. How do people morally evaluate plagiarism involving AI-generated content, and do they judge it differently than when the source is a human? Investigating these questions can provide insight into why people condemn plagiarism; for instance, whether this is due to harm to the original creator or the false benefit gained by the plagiarizer. We examined people's moral evaluations of plagiarism involving AI-generated content in five experiments (N = 1705). In each experiment, participants read scenarios about a poet submitting someone else's poem to a contest without credit. We compared three source types: a friend, ChatGPT, and a little-known poetry blog. In Experiments 1-3, participants judged plagiarism from the blog as more immoral than plagiarism from a friend or ChatGPT, with little difference between the latter two. Moral condemnation increased with the amount of content copied and remained stable when compared to other moral transgressions. In Experiments 4 and 5, moral judgments became harsher when human sources (friend or blog) denied permission, but not when ChatGPT did, suggesting that its refusal was not treated as morally meaningful. When all sources granted permission, differences between conditions disappeared. Overall, these findings support both the harm and false benefit accounts of why people condemn plagiarism. The findings also advance knowledge about how, and when, permission from the source affects condemnation of plagiarism.
We developed a collaborative storytelling model through the Kansas Health Institute's Transforming Public Health for the 21st Century blog to surface, refine, and disseminate practitioner-driven narratives. Grounded in constructivist and interpretive qualitative traditions and informed by duoethnography, the model positions practitioners as cocreators rather than subjects. To ensure rigor and transparency, the approach is explicitly aligned with Tracy's Big Tent Criteria for Excellent Qualitative Research, translating these principles into practical guidance for story selection, co-construction, analysis, and presentation. The model follows a structured yet flexible, step-by-step process that includes practitioner engagement, topic identification, semistructured interviews, iterative qualitative analysis, follow-up interviews, and narrative development. Tracy's criteria, such as worthy topic, rich rigor, sincerity, credibility, resonance, and meaningful coherence, guide each stage of implementation. Final narratives are disseminated through a public-facing blog and national platforms, extending reach and relevance for practitioners and policy audiences. Model feasibility, acceptability, and analytic value are demonstrated through illustrative applications addressing multicounty governance, accreditation in small health departments, and organizational culture change. These examples show how the collaborative storytelling model supports analytic depth, practitioner authenticity, and field relevance across diverse public health contexts. Collaborative storytelling offers a practical strategy for public health transformation by fostering perspective change, practitioner thought leadership, and organizational learning. By embedding established qualitative quality criteria into an accessible, cocreative process, the model provides actionable guidance for leadership development, qualitative training, community health assessment, and capacity building in public health practice.
Maternal mortality is a serious public health issue globally, with countries in West Africa facing some of the highest burdens. Media reportage of maternal deaths can have a significant influence on public health policy. We conducted a content analysis of digital media across the five Anglophone West African countries (The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone) to understand what is reported about maternal deaths and how they are reported. Four to five widely read online newspapers and two of the most popular blogging sites from each country were selected. For each source, we searched for relevant articles, retrieving and including those with a detailed report of maternal death due to obstetric causes. Following data extraction, we used quantitative and qualitative analyses, using the three-delay model and a derived standards checklist based on the Principles of the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Impress Standards Code for coding, respectively. Inter-coder reliability was assessed for quantitative analysis, and audit trail and debriefing conducted for qualitative analysis. Fifty-three detailed articles, consisting of 35 online newspaper articles (61%) and 16 blogs (30%), were included. Most were published in 2023 (30%) and in Nigeria (75%). Delays in facilities, including negligence, malpractice, long waiting times, and withholding care contingent on payment, were frequently mentioned. All articles distinguished fact from opinion, and authors avoided taking a side, 90% were respectful, 68% captured >1 perspective, with most capturing perspectives of the spouse and the government; however, only 6% consulted independent experts. Overall, media reportage of maternal deaths in Anglophone West Africa confirms existing and offers new insights. Preservation of the dignity and respect of pregnant women in death; engagement of multiple voices, including independent experts, and inclusion of actions being undertaken or required to prevent future occurrences will improve reporting and its utility for policy change.