Conference proceeding
Social Support and User Engagement in Online Health Communities
SMART HEALTH, ICSH 2014, Vol.8549, pp.97-110
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
01/01/2014
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-08416-9_10
Abstract
Online health communities (OHCs) have become a major source of social support for people with health problems. Members of OHCs interact online with those who face similar problems and are involved in different types of social supports, such as informational support, emotional support and companionship. Using a case study of an OHC among breast cancer survivors, we first use machine learning techniques to reveal the types of social support embedded in each post from an OHC. Then we generate each user's contribution profile by aggregating the user's involvement in various types of social support and reveal that users play different roles in the OHC. By comparing online activities for users with different roles and conducting survival analysis on users' time span of online activities, we illustrate that users' levels of engagement in an OHC are related to various types of social support in different ways.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Social Support and User Engagement in Online Health Communities
- Creators
- Xi Wang - University of IowaKang Zhao - University of IowaNick Street - Univ Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 USA
- Contributors
- Xiaolong Zheng (Editor)Daniel Zeng (Editor)Hsinchun Chen (Editor)Yong Zhang (Editor)Chunxiao Xing (Editor)Daniel B Neill (Editor)
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- SMART HEALTH, ICSH 2014, Vol.8549, pp.97-110
- Publisher
- Springer Nature
- Series
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-319-08416-9_10
- ISSN
- 0302-9743
- eISSN
- 1611-3349
- Number of pages
- 14
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2014
- Academic Unit
- Nursing; Business Analytics; Center for Evaluation and Assessment; Computer Science; Bus Admin College
- Record Identifier
- 9984380431702771
Metrics
7 Record Views