Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 21, 2025
Date Accepted: May 19, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Need What and Why: A Comparative Analysis of Behavioral Performance, Social Support of Patients in Online Health Communities
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the development of online healthcare, more and more patients are consulting and exchanging social support through online health communities. People with different diseases have different needs for information and emotion. However, current scholars have not adequately studied the similarities and differences in the behavioral performance of patients with different disease types and their social support needs.
Objective:
To study how and why there exist similaries and differences between the behavioral performance of patients with different disease types and their social support needs.
Methods:
By dividing disease types into acute and chronic disease, we crawled 53,245 user data from CHOHC and a total of 492,495 from their posts. Regarding acute disease, we crawled 52,047 raw posting data from 23,659 acute disease users. The pre-trained model is utilized to classify and describe the users'social support performance. Then we mined user behavior and posting content to conduct a comparative analysis of the behaviors, emotions and needs of users in the two major groups in online health community and use user profile and social network analysis to analyze the data.
Results:
The results show that behaviors presented by users in the online health community are related to their emotional needs and social support performance.Chronic disease users have a higher need for emotional support, and these users are more sticky and active in the community. Most chronic disease users focused on emotional support while most of the acute disease users want to seek informational support. The results of the study provide practical implications for doctors, patients'families, and healthcare participants on how to design targeted help and care for patients with both acute and chronic diseases.
Conclusions:
Most chronic disease users focused on emotional support while most of the acute disease users want to seek informational support.
Citation
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Copyright
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