Understanding engagement in online health communities: a trust-based perspective

Online health communities (OHCs) represent a popular and valuable resource for those seeking health information, support, or advice. They have the potential to reduce dependency on traditional health information channels, increase health literacy and empower a broader range of individuals in relation to their health management decisions. Successful communities are characterized by high levels of trust in user-generated contributions, which is reflected in increased engagement and expressed through knowledge adoption and knowledge contribution. However, research shows that the majority of OHCs are composed of passive participants who do not contribute via posts, thereby threatening the sustainability of many communities and their potential for empowerment. Despite this fact, the relationship between trust and engagement, specifically the trust antecedents that influence engagement in the OHC community context has not been adequately explained in past research. In this study, we leverage social capital behavior and social exchange theory frameworks in order to provide a more granular trust-based elucidation of the factors that influence individuals’ engagement in OHCs. We collected data from 410 Brazilian participants of Facebook OHCs and tested the research model using partial least squares. The results confirm two new constructs—online community responsiveness and community support—as trust antecedents that influence engagement in OHCs, resulting in knowledge adoption and knowledge contribution responses. These findings contribute to the trust and engagement literatures and to social media research knowledge. From a practitioner perspective, the study findings can serve as an important guide for moderators and managers seeking to develop trusted and impactful OHC

Psycholinguistic changes in the communication of adolescent users in a suicidal ideation online community during the COVID-19 pandemic

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, increases in suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in adolescents have been registered. Many adolescents experiencing suicidal ideation turn to online communities for social support. In this retrospective observational study, we investigated the communication—language style, contents and user activity—in 7975 unique posts and 51,119 comments by N = 2862 active adolescent users in a large suicidal ideation support community (SISC) on the social media website reddit.com in the onset period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found significant relative changes in language style markers for hopelessness such as negative emotion words (+ 10.00%) and positive emotion words (− 3.45%) as well as for social disengagement such as social references (− 8.63%) and 2nd person pronouns (− 33.97%) since the outbreak of the pandemic. Using topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we identified significant changes in content for the topics Hopelessness (+ 23.98%), Suicide Methods (+ 17.11%), Social Support (− 14.91%), and Reaching Out to users (− 28.97%). Changes in user activity point to an increased expression of mental health issues and decreased engagement with other users. The results indicate a potential shift in communication patterns with more adolescent users expressing their suicidal ideation rather than relating with or supporting other users during the COVID-19 pandemic

"Every small action helps towards the greater cause" : online communities scaling up online community-led citizen science in addressing litter challenges in Scotland

Social media is now a new means of engagement and a catalyst for citizen science; still, less attention has been paid to understanding the influence of online communities on community-led citizen science projects. This study used the Fife Street Champions public Facebook group as a case study to explore how online community-led citizen science projects generate citizen science data to understand littering challenges in Scotland and to examine the impact of the group’s activities and the challenges they face. Data driven-content analysis was used to analyse Facebook user-generated data of 337 posts with comments and images to identify key themes that emerge in the data. Results indicate that group members develop their own data collection tools, share, analyse and present their litter-picking activities to understand the magnitude of littering and the impact of their litter-picking activities. However, the findings highlight inconsistencies in how group members collect and record data from their litter-picking activities. The group also provides informational support, environmental awareness and advocacy, and environmental citizenship. Members also share concerns about eco-anxiety. Lastly, safety and health concerns, COVID-19, and seagulls are challenges experienced by online-based litter pickers. The results contribute to our understanding of the opportunity that social media platforms can provide to build more robust online community-driven citizen science projects that can inform further research. Key stakeholders need to collaborate with such communities to improve on collecting scientifically meaningful data.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact

Explores current methodologies for assessing social issue documentary films by combining strategic design and evaluation of multiplatform outreach and impact, including documentaries' role in network- and field-building. Includes six case studies

The Evidence Hub: harnessing the collective intelligence of communities to build evidence-based knowledge

Conventional document and discussion websites provide users with no help in assessing the quality or quantity of evidence behind any given idea. Besides, the very meaning of what evidence is may not be unequivocally defined within a community, and may require deep understanding, common ground and debate. An Evidence Hub is a tool to pool the community collective intelligence on what is evidence for an idea. It provides an infrastructure for debating and building evidence-based knowledge and practice. An Evidence Hub is best thought of as a filter onto other websites — a map that distills the most important issues, ideas and evidence from the noise by making clear why ideas and web resources may be worth further investigation. This paper describes the Evidence Hub concept and rationale, the breath of user engagement and the evolution of specific features, derived from our work with different community groups in the healthcare and educational sector