What do we mean by social support? A systematic review of HCI research investigating and designing for social support

Paper Title

What do we mean by social support? A systematic review of HCI research investigating and designing for social support

Publication Info

• Topic area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on social support and its technological facilitation.
• Keywords: Social support, HCI, technology-mediated support, systematic review, social media, online communities, health, peer support, design, ethics.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: HCI research lacks consistent definitions and conceptualizations of social support, often treating it as uniformly positive and overlooking its multidimensional nature.
• Significance: Social support is critical for health and well-being, and technology increasingly mediates supportive interactions. Clear conceptualizations are necessary to design and evaluate effective systems.
• Motivation and related work: Prior reviews have focused on specific domains like health information systems or social networking sites. This paper aims to provide a broader synthesis of how social support is conceptualized, investigated, and designed for in HCI research.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A systematic literature review of 183 HCI papers to analyze trends, gaps, and opportunities in the study and design of technology-mediated social support.
• Novelty:
  1. A synthesis of conceptual frameworks and definitions of social support in HCI.
  2. Identification of methodological patterns and approaches in studying and designing for social support.
  3. An agenda for diversifying research contexts, methodologies, and domains of social support.
  4. Highlighting theoretical and ethical implications, including the multidimensional nature of social support and the role of non-human agents.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Systematic literature review following PRISMA guidelines.
  • Search conducted in ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and Gale OneFile for papers published between 1990 and 2025.
  • Content analysis to identify trends in conceptualization, operationalization, system development phases, research methods, and contexts.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 50% of papers did not explicitly conceptualize social support. Among those that did, 30% used typologies, 27% provided definitions, and 3% conflated conceptualization with outcomes.
  • Social support was most often operationalized as peer support among strangers (48%) or relational support (40%).
  • Most studies focused on social media and online communities (64%) and health-related contexts (68%).
  • Research methods were dominated by surveys (38%) and interviews (34%), with limited use of participatory design or field deployments.
  • Only one paper explicitly addressed the potential negative outcomes of social support.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Provides a comprehensive synthesis of HCI research on social support, highlighting gaps in conceptual clarity and methodological diversity.
  • Offers actionable recommendations for addressing theoretical, ethical, and design challenges in future research.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Analysis of 183 papers, focusing on conceptualization, operationalization, system development phases, research methods, and contexts.
  • Inter-rater reliability of 88% achieved during coding and analysis.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Exclusion of social science-oriented databases may have missed relevant interdisciplinary studies.
  • Focused on the term "social support," potentially overlooking adjacent constructs like belonging or connectedness.
  • Future work should explore these adjacent constructs, diversify methodologies, and address ethical concerns of non-human support.

Summary

This systematic review of 183 HCI studies reveals significant gaps in how social support is conceptualized, operationalized, and designed for in technology-mediated contexts. While most research focuses on health-related topics and social media, there is a lack of theoretical cohesion and limited exploration of multidimensional and ethical aspects of social support. The review highlights the need for clearer definitions, diversified methodologies, and expanded research domains to better design technologies that facilitate meaningful and effective social support. Future work should also address the ethical implications of non-human agents and the potential negative outcomes of social support.