TY - GEN
T1 - A sociotechnical mechanism for online support provision
AU - Introne, Joshua
AU - Semaan, Bryan
AU - Goggins, Sean
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by NSF grant VOSS-1422982.
PY - 2016/5/7
Y1 - 2016/5/7
N2 - Social support can significantly improve health outcomes for individuals living with disease, and online forums have emerged as an important vehicle for social support. Whereas research has focused on the delivery and use of social support, little is known about how these communities are sustained. We describe one sociotechnical mechanism that enables sustainable communities to provide social support to a large number of people. We focus upon thirteen disease-specific discussion forums hosted by the WebMD online health community. In these forums, small, densely connected cores of members who maintain strong relationships generate the majority of support for others. Through content analysis we find they provide informational support to a large number of more itinerant members, but provide one another with community support. Based on these observations, we describe a sociotechnical mechanism of online support that is distinct from nonsupport oriented communities, and has implications for the design of self-sustaining online support systems.
AB - Social support can significantly improve health outcomes for individuals living with disease, and online forums have emerged as an important vehicle for social support. Whereas research has focused on the delivery and use of social support, little is known about how these communities are sustained. We describe one sociotechnical mechanism that enables sustainable communities to provide social support to a large number of people. We focus upon thirteen disease-specific discussion forums hosted by the WebMD online health community. In these forums, small, densely connected cores of members who maintain strong relationships generate the majority of support for others. Through content analysis we find they provide informational support to a large number of more itinerant members, but provide one another with community support. Based on these observations, we describe a sociotechnical mechanism of online support that is distinct from nonsupport oriented communities, and has implications for the design of self-sustaining online support systems.
KW - Online communities
KW - Online social support
KW - Social network analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85006111111&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85006111111&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2858036.2858582
DO - 10.1145/2858036.2858582
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85006111111
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 3559
EP - 3571
BT - CHI 2016 - Proceedings, 34th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 34th Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2016
Y2 - 7 May 2016 through 12 May 2016
ER -