Exploring The Effects Of Members' Social Capital On Social Support Provision In Online Patient Communities

Due to inconvenience in movement,lack of similar peers,or stigmatization of diseases,patients often have communication pressures in close offline social relationships,which makes it difficult for them to obtain face-to-face support.The online patient community provides a platform to share information and emotionally communicate for patient groups,which has a positive impact on their physical and mental health.While some researches concentrate on the reasons why individuals join online patient communities and how social support impacts their health outcomes,we know little about the factors that drive members of online patient communities to provide various types of social support,especially emotional support.Therefore,this research explores the driving factors of social support in patient community,in order to enrich the research on online patient groups and provide guidance for website optimization to promote the generation of social support.This research is expanded from the following aspects.(1)Based on the three-dimensional social capital framework and social support theory,this research builds a model about the impact of structural,relational and cognitive social capital on informational and emotional support.(2)This research collected data from the “sweet homeland” website,which is an online community for diabetic patients,and used the natural language processing methods such as text analysis,LDA topic mining,and text matching to analyze the data.(3)Through empirical analysis,this research examines the relationship between social capital(structural,relational and cognitive capital)and social support(informational and emotional support).This research also examines the moderation effect of member's rank that represents the member's status.The result shows structural social capital(interaction frequency,interaction intensity)impacts the provision of informational and emotional support positively;part of relational capital(social identity)impacts the provision of informational and emotional support positively;shared language impacts the provision of emotional support more strongly than informational support,while healthcare-related expertise impacts the provision of informational support more strongly than emotional support.Furthermore,member rank positively moderates the effect of structural social capital and cognitive social capital on the provision of information and emotional support.Theoretically,this research expands the application of the social capital framework and provides important insights into the driving factors on the social support provision.It also illustrates the effectiveness and necessity of the community to improve member incentive mechanisms.Practically,this research provides suggestions on the design and operation of online patient communities,so as to promote members' voluntary contributions.Also,the mining methods such as text classification and text similarity calculation used in this research provide a way for future researchers to analyze Internet text data.