Modern Social Science Research

With the popularization of Internet technology, online platforms have gradually become an important field for special groups to express their demands and establish social support. The ALS group, as a marginalized and vulnerable group, is one of the objects that social work should pay attention to and assist. Research has found that the ALS group faces three major predicaments: At the psychological level, patients generally experience a psychological chain from emotional loss of control to value dissolution; At the family level, long-term care leads to the predicament of family economic pressure and family role transformation. At the social level, low public awareness and imperfect policies have exacerbated the marginalization of groups. Therefore, this paper adopts the method of online ethnography to discover the survival predicament of the ALS group through online participation observation, online interviews and online interaction, and explores the solution strategies from the perspective of social work.

Online ethnography; ALS community; Social work