Predicting Social Support Exchanging Among Male Homosexuals Who are HIV-Positive in Social Media Context: The Role of Online Self-Disclosure

ABSTRACT

This study investigated social support exchanges on social media among male homosexuals who are HIV-positive (MHHP) in China and explored how online self-disclosure relates to such activity. Analyses were based on 9,459 Weibo messages posted by 188 targeted users.

Results showed that the informational and emotional support messages were prevalent in the Chinese context, and esteem social support was first found to be the most salient by the current investigation. Results of independent samples t-tests suggested that MHHP who engaged in significant self-disclosure on Weibo tended to have more frequent social support exchanges than those who did not. In particular, MHHP who expressed sex-seeking intentions and companionship seeking intentions were likely to post more supportive messages than those who did not express such intentions. Moreover, MHHP who disclosed their concerns over discrimination tended to post more emotional, informational, and esteem support messages than those who did not express discrimination concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Online self-disclosure
• social support
• social media
• male homosexuals
• HIV-positive
• social interaction need
• discrimination concern
• content analysis

Acknowledgments

We appreciate our graduate students’ help in the coding process.