Meeting Patients Where They're At: Toward the Expansion of Chaplaincy Care into Online Spiritual Care Communities

2025-06-12

AI Summary

The U.S. faces a critical imbalance between demand for and supply of spiritual care, compounded by lagging digital adoption; CSCW/HCI research has long overlooked professional pastoral care practice. Method: Through 22 in-depth interviews with pastoral care providers and iterative field-based user testing on anonymous, asynchronous, text-based online communities (e.g., Reddit), we applied grounded theory analysis and evaluated existing technology taxonomies. Contribution/Results: We propose the “Care Loop” model to bridge institutional clinical care and platform-mediated community care. Our findings delineate the boundary conditions for effective online spiritual care and identify novel intervention needs. We establish three core values of Online Spiritual Care Communities (OSCCs): on-demand accessibility, scalable reach, and patient-initiated engagement. We clarify pastoral caregivers’ pivotal roles in facilitating interaction, mediating content, and enabling resource referral, while surfacing key design challenges and ethical risks—including privacy, boundary management, and epistemic authority.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Social Networks and Social Media: Analysis of web-mediated communications, communities, and crowds

Abstract

Despite a growing need for spiritual care in the US, it is often under-served, inaccessible, or misunderstood, while almost no prior work in CSCW/HCI research has engaged with professional chaplains and spiritual care providers. This interdisciplinary study aims to develop a foundational understanding of how spiritual care may (or may not) be expanded into online spaces -- especially focusing on anonymous, asynchronous, and text-based online communities. We conducted an exploratory mixed-methods study with chaplains (N=22) involving interviews and user testing sessions centered around Reddit support communities to understand participants' perspectives on technology and their ideations about the role of chaplaincy in prospective Online Spiritual Care Communities (OSCCs). Our Grounded Theory Method analysis highlighted benefits of OSCCs including: meeting patients where they are at; accessibility and scalability; and facilitating patient-initiated care. Chaplains highlighted how their presence in OSCCs could help with shaping peer interactions, moderation, synchronous chats for group care, and redirecting to external resources, while also raising important feasibility concerns, risks, and needs for future design and research. We used an existing taxonomy of chaplaincy techniques to show that some spiritual care strategies may be amenable to online spaces, yet we also exposed the limitations of technology to fully mediate spiritual care and the need to develop new online chaplaincy interventions. Based on these findings, we contribute the model of a ``Care Loop'' between institutionally-based formal care and platform-based community care to expand access and drive greater awareness and utilization of spiritual care. We also contribute design implications to guide future work in online spiritual care.

Problem

• Expanding chaplaincy care into online spiritual communities
• Addressing accessibility and scalability of spiritual care
• Exploring technology's role in mediating spiritual care

Innovation

• Online Spiritual Care Communities (OSCCs) expansion
• Mixed-methods study with professional chaplains
• Care Loop model for spiritual care integration