Premium
Using content and network analysis to understand the social support exchange patterns and user behaviors of an online smoking cessation intervention program
Author(s) -
Zhang Mi,
Yang Christopher C.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23189
Subject(s) - social support , psychology , intervention (counseling) , social network (sociolinguistics) , smoking cessation , information exchange , social exchange theory , social media , applied psychology , social psychology , world wide web , computer science , medicine , psychiatry , telecommunications , pathology
Informational support and nurturant support are two basic types of social support offered in online health communities. This study identifies types of social support in the Q uitStop forum and brings insights to exchange patterns of social support and user behaviors with content analysis and social network analysis. Motivated by user information behavior, this study defines two patterns to describe social support exchange: initiated support exchange and invited support exchange. It is found that users with a longer quitting time tend to actively give initiated support, and recent quitters with a shorter abstinent time are likely to seek and receive invited support. This study also finds that support givers of informational support quit longer ago than support givers of nurturant support, and support receivers of informational support quit more recently than support receivers of nurturant support. Usually, informational support is offered by users at late quit stages to users at early quit stages. Nurturant support is also exchanged among users within the same quit stage. These findings help us understand how health consumers are supporting each other and reveal new capabilities of online intervention programs that can be designed to offer social support in a timely and effective manner.