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Abstract
The use of the internet for health purposes is increasing, as is the number of sites and online communities aimed at helping people to stop smoking. Some of the effects of online communities may be mediated through a sense of community. By using the computer-program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count with a Norwegian dictionary, we investigated whether there was a development of sense of community in a forum related to a Norwegian smoking cessation intervention, by examining the use of self-referencing vs. collective referencing words. Data from a 4-year period, including in total 5242 web pages, were included. There was a significant increase in the use of collective words over time and a significant decrease in the use of self-referencing words. The increase in the use of collective words suggests that there appears to be a development of a sense of community in the forum over time. More research is needed to study the importance of an online sense of community.
Acknowledgements
The study is supported in part by EXTRA funds from the Norwegian Foundation for Health and Rehabilitation, and funds from the Norwegian Directorate for Health. The authors wish to thank Roger J. Booth and James W. Pennebaker for their support with regard to use and scoring of the LIWC-application. The Norwegian version of the LIWC dictionary was made available by Paul Moxnes at The Norwegian School of Management (BI). Also, the authors would like to thank Inger Merete Skarpaas at the Norwegian Cancer Association for her contributions to developing the intervention, Olav Nilsen at the Norwegian Centre for Integrated Care and Telemedicine for help with data collection, and Leena Eklund at the University West, Sweden, for helpful input to an earlier version of this paper. The authors also thank the participants in the ISG that formed part of the study.