Social Network Analysis In Online Health Community And Its Impact On Health Improvement

In recent years,with the development of Internet technology,medical informatization is rising rapidly.The emergence of online health community not only provides a new channel for people to seek health information and share health knowledge,but also allows users to obtain social support to achieve self-health management.In this context,it has become a widely concerned research direction in academic circles to study how users of online health community form social relationships and whether online health community can improve users’ health problems.At present,some meaningful studies have been carried out on the participation behavior and the impact of social networks of users in online health communities at home and abroad.however,these studies lack of in-depth analysis of the formation of online health social network relationship from two aspects of users’ online participation behavior characteristics and individual characteristics,especially seldom discuss the impact of online social networks on the improvement of users’ health.Based on the current research on online health community,this paper constructs a social network statistical model of exponential random graph to explore the formation mechanism of user social network in online health community and its impact on health.Empirical research methods are adopted to test the relevant influencing factors.It is divided into two parts:(1)This chapter explores the factors influencing the formation of social network relationships among users in the online health community.We divide the online health social network into information support network and emotional support network,and explore the influencing factors of the formation of online social network from the two dimensions of network self-organization and actor attributes.And to further explore whether there is a relationship between the two social networks.In this study,we use social network theory to build an Exponential Random Graph Model model to test 18 hypotheses.We take the online health community as the experimental sample to conduct an empirical study.The results show that network self-organization has a significant positive impact on the formation of information support network and emotional support network,and the platform attributes of most users have a significant positive impact on the formation of information support network and emotional support network.However,users’demographic attributes(such as gender)are not an important factor in the formation of online health social networks.In addition,we also find that there are significant entrainment effect and insignificant exchange effect between the two social support networks.(2)This chapter explores the impact of social networks in online health communities on the improvement of users’ health.We explore the impact of online health social networks on user health improvement from three aspects:network location effects,network attribute effects and covariable effects.Based on the social capital theory,this study constructs an Autologistic Actor Attribute Models model to test 10 hypotheses.We take the online health community as the experimental sample to conduct an empirical study.The results show that the network location effect has a significant positive effect on the improvement of users’ health.In addition,a small number of network location effects and covariable effects affect the improvement of user health.The purpose of this paper is to study the formation mechanism of social networks in online health and its impact on users’ health.This study enriches the research theory of social network in online health community and has important practical significance for managers and users of online health community.At the same time,this study deepens people’s understanding of the value of the online health community,which shows that the online health community can have a positive impact on users and provide important support for the operational policies of platform managers.