Social support exchanges in a social media community for people living with HIV/AIDS in China

Abstract

In recent years, social media has become an important source of social support. People living with HIV/AIDS in China created an online support group (the HIV/AIDS Weibo Group) on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, in January 2011. The current study examined how social support transmitted in this social media community. First, messages over five successive weeks (2 May 2011 to 13 June 2011) were randomly selected from the HIV/AIDS Weibo Group on Weibo. Next, we employed social network analysis to map the HIV/AIDS Weibo Group’s structure and to measure the study variables. After that, a multivariate analysis of variance was applied to examine the influence of frequency of contact and reciprocity on informational and emotional social support exchanged in each dyad. The results revealed that pairs with a high level of contact frequency or reciprocity exchanged more informational support than do pairs with a low level of contact frequency or reciprocity. Moreover, dyadic partners with high frequency of contact exchanged a larger amount of emotional support than those with a low level frequency of contact; but strongly reciprocal dyads did not exchange significantly more emotional social support than their counterparts with a low level of reciprocity.

Keywords:

• social media
• social network analysis
• social support
• social ties
• China

Notes

1. Two authors have done a study which content analyzed all the messages of the HIV/AIDS Weibo Group from 18 January 2011 to 14 September 2012. The results showed that plenty of informational and emotional support and limited instrumental support existed in the HIV/AIDS Weibo Group. The current study randomly selected messages over five successive weeks to investigate the mechanism of social support exchanges within this social media community. Given that the number of instrumental support messages is too small for creating a network, only emotional and informational exchange networks are built and examined in the current study. For the readers who are interesting in the coding scheme and procedure of the supportive messages, please refer to Anonymous (2014).

2. Examples for emotional support messages: “Come on! We should look after ourselves”; “Don’t worry. You should have courage and faith.”

3. Examples for informational support messages: “Your CD4 cell count is below 350, so you should take medicines as early as possible to live longer”; “I just did a CD4 test several days ago. My CD4 count was 897.”