Research On Factors That Influence Provision Of Social Support In Online Health Communities

The aging of China’s population has led to a rapid increase in the number of patients,coupled with the current shortage of medical resources in our country,leading to the vigorous development of online health communities.The development of the Internet and e Health websites have made it possible to provide social support through the Internet,which eliminates geographical and time constraints and becomes a good complement to traditional offline social support.Online health communities provide users with open platforms for acquiring health knowledge,sharing experiences,and expressing emotions.At the same time,it can also meet the social needs of users.Users can participate in community activities by posting,replying,sharing experiences and adding friends.Users’ online self-disclosure behavior has generated a lot of content in online health communities.The generated content includes a lot of user-related health information,life experiences,medical knowledge and other information.These contents are the basis for the existence and development of online health communities.The prosperity and success of communities depend on users’ provision of social support.Therefore,investigating why the users are willing to provide social support is a significant research question.This study focuses on online health communities in China,combining objective network data with social survey data.First,we use text mining methods to get data from existing online health communities.We have a general understanding of online health communities by social network analysis.Second,utilizing social exchange theory,we propose a benefitcost model to study the incentive factors and inhibiting factors of the social support in OHCs.In the model,the benefits are extended to the psychological rewards,including sense of belongings and sense of self-worth.Costs are extended to personal health information privacy concerns.We also study the moderation effect of psychological distance based on construal level theory.We divide the psychological distance into several dimensions,and explore the moderating roles of different dimensions and put forward the hypothesis.According to the phenomenon of privacy paradox,this paper explores the causes of privacy paradox,and the moderating effect of empathy on health information privacy concerns and willingness to provide social support.The data is collected by questionnaire and the hypotheses are verified.Finally,based on the research results,an online health website function optimization plan is proposed,with a view to providing guidance for website service providers on how to improve user activity.The results show that: First,sense of belongings and self-worth can promote users’ willingness to provide social support in online health communities.However,each dimension of psychological distance plays a different role in moderating the relationship between them.Information distance can negatively moderate the relationship between sense of self-worth and provision of social support.Social distance can positively moderate the relationship between sense of self-worth and provision of social support.Experience distance has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between sense of belonging and provision of social support,nor on the relationship between sense of self-worth and the willingness to provide social support.The perceived benefits should be improved,and the psychological distance should be shortened to encourage users to provide social support in online health communities.Secondly,the privacy of health information is negatively related to the willingness to provide social support,and empathy can ease the relationship between them,thus enriching the research on the privacy paradox in online health communities.Based on the research results,we give suggestions for the development of online health community,the improvement of community users’ health literacy and the improvement of user experience.