Sharing Illness Experiences on Twitter: Conversations of Parents with Children Diagnosed with Cancer

The purpose of this research study is to identify the key themes of tweets posted by parents of children diagnosed with cancer, as well as to identify the reported motivations and benefits for using Twitter as a means to share information related to a child's cancer experience. Tweets were collected from 17 twitter accounts that belong to parents of children diagnosed with cancer, and e-mail interviews were conducted with 5 of the parents. Savolainen's framework of everyday information practice was applied in understanding the key themes of tweets posted by the parents recruited for this study. The themes include---social support and coping, casual conversations, sharing childhood cancer related facts, promoting campaigns and fundraising, raising awareness, and providing updates. The findings of this study added new information to existing research that could potentially lead to the development of a theory of online health communication during illness.