Jeremy Heyer
Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, USA
Substance use disorders (SUDs) are characterized by an inability to decrease a substance use (e.g., alcohol or opioids) despite negative repercussions. SUDs are clinically diagnosable, hazardous, and considered a public health issue. Sponsorship, a specialized type of peer mentorship, is vital in the recovery process and originates from 12-step fellowship programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA). To investigate sponsorship relationship practices and to identify design opportunities for digitally-mediated peer support, we conducted 27 in-depth interviews with members of AA and NA. We identified five key sponsorship relationship practices relevant for designing social computing tools to support sponsorship and recovery: 1) assessing dyadic compatibility, 2) managing sponsorship with or without technology, 3) establishing boundaries, 4) building a peer support network, and 5) managing anonymity. We identify social computing and digitally-mediated design opportunities and implications.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376241
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2020.acm.org/)