Prawit Thainiyom*, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States Track: Research Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-05-16

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Background: The emergence of internet and social media in the 21st century provides new channels of participation in health social movements which previously did not exist. Citizens are now utilizing online petition websites like Change.org to successfully recruit people to join campaigns against public agencies and major corporations that inflict pertinent grievances upon them. Despite this growing phenomenon, scant research has been done to help us understand how health petition messages are framed to mobilize people to participate in online activism.

Objectives: This study aims to explore the prevalence of different types of framing in online health petitions and their correlations with the level of participation.

Methods: A content analysis of 200 online health petitions on Change.org was conducted in this study. The content of each petition was analyzed and coded under the categories of the following variables: diagnostic frame (types of the health problems), target to blame (federal government, state/local government, and corporations), prognostic frame (solutions to the health problems), motivational frame (severity, urgency, efficacy, and moral obligation content), salience (significance and relevance of the problem), petition creator (an individual or an organization) and level of online participation (number of petition signatures).

Results: The results of this study indicated that the most prevalent diagnostic and prognostic framing were related to healthcare access, unsafe substances in consumer products, contested science and policy on the cause, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of a medical condition, and discriminatory policy that stigmatizes a particular population. Different types of diagnostic and prognostic framing of petitions also generated significantly different level of online participation. Petitions directed at the federal government also garnered more signatures than petitions which were directed at the state/local government. In addition, petitions with more motivational and resonance framing content had more likelihood of receiving greater signature responses.

Conclusion: This study reveals which sectors of health social movements are inhabited by activists who are savvy in utilizing internet and social media as tools in mobilizing public support to address their health problems. Health social movement activists that incorporated stronger language of moral obligation, and other components of motivational and salience framing tend to maximize the likelihood of online participation from the public. Online petitions are more effective as a mobilization tool for health problems that have simple and easily understood solutions than those with more complex solutions. Implications of other findings for the field of health communication, health social movements, and digital activism research were discussed, particularly on what kind of framing messages should be employed to effectively craft online petitions to maximize the likelihood of participation.