TY - GEN
T1 - Does Online Social Support Work in Stigmatized Chronic Diseases? A Study of the Impacts of Different Facets of Informational and Emotional Support on Self-Care Behavior in an HIV Online Forum
AU - Wang, Xunyi
AU - Bagul, Darshan Mahendra
AU - Parameswaran, Srikanth
AU - Kishore, Rajiv
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - We build an online social support model of self-care behavior for patients of stigmatized chronic diseases. We conceptualize three dimensions of informational support namely objective information, experiential information, and crowd consensus, and hypothesize their positive effect on self-care behavior. We conceptualize three dimensions of emotional support namely emotional tone, self-disclosure, and community involvement, and hypothesize their positive effect on self-care behavior. We also hypothesize how these dimensions interact with each other in promoting self-care behavior. Using data from 31,132 threads from an online health community for HIV patients, we test our hypotheses using Tobit regression. We find statistically significant support for our hypotheses, except for the interaction of experiential and objective information on self-care. Contrary to our hypotheses, we find that self-disclosure is negatively associated with self-care behavior. Our findings have important implications for management of stigmatized chronic diseases.
AB - We build an online social support model of self-care behavior for patients of stigmatized chronic diseases. We conceptualize three dimensions of informational support namely objective information, experiential information, and crowd consensus, and hypothesize their positive effect on self-care behavior. We conceptualize three dimensions of emotional support namely emotional tone, self-disclosure, and community involvement, and hypothesize their positive effect on self-care behavior. We also hypothesize how these dimensions interact with each other in promoting self-care behavior. Using data from 31,132 threads from an online health community for HIV patients, we test our hypotheses using Tobit regression. We find statistically significant support for our hypotheses, except for the interaction of experiential and objective information on self-care. Contrary to our hypotheses, we find that self-disclosure is negatively associated with self-care behavior. Our findings have important implications for management of stigmatized chronic diseases.
KW - Emotional support
KW - HIV online forum analysis
KW - Informational support
KW - Linguistic analysis
KW - Online forum analysis
KW - Online social support
KW - Self-care behavior
KW - Stigmatized chronic diseases
KW - Text analysis
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85126494382
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85126494382
SN - 9780996683159
T3 - ICIS 2017: Transforming Society with Digital Innovation
BT - ICIS 2017
PB - Association for Information Systems
T2 - 38th International Conference on Information Systems: Transforming Society with Digital Innovation, ICIS 2017
Y2 - 10 December 2017 through 13 December 2017
ER -