You Get What You Give: Understanding Reply Reciprocity and Social Capital in Online Health Support Forums

Abstract

Adopting a social network analysis approach, the present study examined social capital and network dynamics of online support seeking and support provision in a depression forum. We constructed a depression forum network by mapping out all of the users and the reply ties among them. The findings showed a consistently reciprocal pattern between users’ replies sent to others and replies received from others. Forum users’ bridging social capital was positively associated with the source diversity of their received replies and negatively associated with the average length of their received replies. Furthermore, forum users’ bonding social capital was positively associated with the average length of their received replies and negatively associated with the source diversity of their received replies.

Notes

¹ Depression Forums (www.depressionforums.org) was founded in July 2004 as an online discussion forum in which individuals can talk to others about depression, anxiety, mood disorders, medications, and recovery.

² We also conducted the same analysis with people who had sent out or received at least one reply (N = 16,982, Network 1). All hypotheses were supported except for Hypothesis 7. One possible explanation for this is that most users of Network 1 were not actively involved in the online support forum activities, as 35% of the users either contributed or received only one reply, and almost 75% received or sent out five or fewer replies.

³ Betweenness should be differentiated from degree, which simply measures how many unique ties an actor has with others. For example, an actor can have a high degree but very little betweenness if all of the actor’s contacts are connected among themselves. In this case, this actor holds little bridging social capital because he or she does not serve as a bridge that links disparate groups together.

⁴ In the final analysis, to align the scale of betweenness with other variables, we multiplied the betweenness score by 1,000 (Shen & Cage, 2013).

⁵ The source diversity of in-replies should be differentiated from the construct of in-degree. In-degree only measures the number of users one has received replies from in the support forum and does not account for the frequency of interactions. Source diversity of in-replies, however, takes into account both the frequency of interactions and the number of users with whom one has interacted. Therefore, it is a more comprehensive measure to represent the outcome brought out by bridging capital.