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Paper Type
Complete
Description
Online health communities offer a platform for patients to seek support from other users with similar conditions. As those support seekers’ situation improves, they may ultimately want to give back to the community and provide support to others. This study explores how seekers’ ability to provide support, operationalized using their cognitive state and social network structure, can influence the seekers’ propensity to switch roles and become support providers. We leverage the Dual Perspective Model of Agency and Communion and Social Networks literature to theorize a seeker’s ability to provide support. We apply survival analysis to study seekers’ first role switch to a provider and the duration from seekers’ initial post to role switch. We find that while seekers who have higher positive agency and closeness centrality are more likely to switch roles to a provider, those having higher positive communality, degree centrality, and eigenvector centrality are less likely to switch.
Paper Number
1419
Recommended Citation
Lee, Michael; Liao, Ruochen; Wang, Xunyi; and Kishore, Rajiv, "From Seeker to Provider: User Ability and Role Switching in Online Support Communities" (2023). AMCIS 2023 Proceedings. 11.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2023/sig_health/sig_health/11
From Seeker to Provider: User Ability and Role Switching in Online Support Communities
Online health communities offer a platform for patients to seek support from other users with similar conditions. As those support seekers’ situation improves, they may ultimately want to give back to the community and provide support to others. This study explores how seekers’ ability to provide support, operationalized using their cognitive state and social network structure, can influence the seekers’ propensity to switch roles and become support providers. We leverage the Dual Perspective Model of Agency and Communion and Social Networks literature to theorize a seeker’s ability to provide support. We apply survival analysis to study seekers’ first role switch to a provider and the duration from seekers’ initial post to role switch. We find that while seekers who have higher positive agency and closeness centrality are more likely to switch roles to a provider, those having higher positive communality, degree centrality, and eigenvector centrality are less likely to switch.
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