Informational practices of the discursive community on fibromyalgia in discussion and support groups on facebook

Abstract

It deals with the informational practices of the discursive community on Fibromyalgia in support groups and discussion of social media Facebook. It’s general objective is to identify the informational practices of this discursive community in discussion groups and social media support, and as specific objectives to know how the discursive community seeks, builds, evaluates and shares information from everyday life related to Fibromyalgia, as well as to verify the types of information that informational subjects seek and share within Facebook discussion and support groups. It is an exploratory and qualitative research that uses as a data collection technique the self-applied questionnaire, organized thematically, composed of closed questions and published in 6 (six) Facebook groups: Fibromyalgia and the pain, Fibromyalgia I have: friends, I have fibromyalgia, now what?, Fibromyalgia and its symptoms, I have fibromyalgia and Fibromyalgia Support Group. To analyze the data, thematic analysis performed in three stages was used: pre-analysis, exploration of the material and treatment of the results obtained, and interpretation. The community interested in the Fibromyalgia topic served as a corpus for data collection, being considered, for this, carriers and non-carriers of the syndrome, Brazilian or not, members of the aforementioned communities on Facebook. The research results show that the discursive community is heterogeneous and that the motivations for joining these groups are diverse. Individuals use the media as a secondary source of information to resolve specific demands and are sources of information for other community members. Most of the information shared has an interactive objective and reveals that the groups function not only as a space for obtaining information, but also as a place for collective support. The study also revealed that personal and medical experiences have the same relevance for individuals and that the information found in media groups can impact the subjects' daily lives. It is concluded that the groups are positive and that they contribute not only to the collective construction of knowledge but also to the fight against the disease by enabling the exchange of experiences between individuals.