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Purpose – This research considers how self-help groups (SHGs) and self-help organizations (SHOs) contribute to consumerist trends in two different societies: United States and United Kingdom. How do the health care systems and the voluntary sectors affect the kinds of social changes that SHGs/SHOs make?

Methodology/approach – A review of research on the role of SHGs/SHOs in contributing to national health social movements in the UK and US was made. Case studies of the UK and the US compare the characteristics of their health care systems and their voluntary sector. Research reviews of two community level self-help groups in each country describe the kinds of social changes they made.

Findings – The research review verified that SHGs/SHOs contribute to national level health social movements for patient consumerism. The case studies showed that community level SHGs/SHOs successfully made the same social changes but on a smaller scale as the national movements, and the health care system affects the kinds of community changes made.

Research limitations – A limited number of SHGs/SHOs within only two societies were studied. Additional SHGs/SHOs within a variety of societies need to be studied.

Originality/value of chapter – Community SHGs/SHOs are often trivialized by social scientists as just inward-oriented support groups, but this chapter shows that local groups contribute to patient consumerism and social changes but in ways that depend on the kind of health care system and societal context.

To specify the nature of experiential information by examining how such information is articulated and shared in online discussion.

Experiential information is approached by identifying two constitutive aspects: (1) sensory information that an individual obtains from noticeable events lived through by means of human senses such as sight and touch and (2) cognitive–affective information that is indicative of how the individual interprets such events by means of cognitive operations like comparison and evaluation, as well as appraises the affective valence of such events. To examine the nature of experiential information, an empirical study was made by analysing how people articulate sensory and cognitive–affective information in online discussion about the COVID-19 epidemic. To this end, a sample of 1773 messages posted to the online forum hosted by the Canadian Broadcasting Company was scrutinized by means of descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis.

Experiential information was mainly articulated in the depiction of visual observations of lived-through events, as well as in their comparison and evaluation. Experiential information was often articulated in conjunction with information of other types, most notably topic-related opinions, neutral descriptions of COVID-19 related issues and suggestions offered to fellow participants.

As the study concentrated on the sharing of experiential information about the COVID-19 epidemic in an online discussion forum, the findings cannot be extended to concern the exchange of experiential information in other contexts.

The study is among the first to characterize empirically the nature of experiential information by examining the articulations of online discussants.