In our study of people with diabetes, high blood pressure, and kidney disease in Flint, Michigan, we found people actively trying to manage their health in the face of poverty, potentially violent conditions, high stress, and a distrust of institutionalized medicine. More specifically, we observed people translating the health information they're handed into the context of their everyday lives - creating local strategies for chronic illness management.

Our group was one of the originators of expertise sharing as an area of study. Our work has included expertise finders, people recommenders, and collaborative help systems. As well, we have conducted many studies of how people helped one another through computer-mediated communications and within organizations. As the span of networks and computational systems expanded, the scope of our study expanded to Internet-scale systems and communities. Recent work has also expanded to Q&A communities (question-and-answer) communities and social search. 

The SocialWorlds Research group has conducted numerous studies of Q&A communities. Our interest has been in how these communities function. The first study was of Java Forum, and it detailed how the community functioned and how expertise was distributed and shared. We then studied Yahoo Answers, along with its sister sites Naver in Korea and Baidu in China. We also compared the three sites. These studies examined why answerer helped, and whether there were intercultural differences.