Seekers, Providers, Welcomers, and Storytellers: Modeling Social Roles in Online Health Communities

Abstract

Participants in online communities often enact different roles when participating in their communities. For example, some in cancer support communities specialize in providing disease-related information or socializing new members. This work clusters the behavioral patterns of users of a cancer support community into specific functional roles. Based on a series of quantitative and qualitative evaluations, this research identified eleven roles that members occupy, such as welcomer and story sharer. We investigated role dynamics, including how roles change over members' lifecycles, and how roles predict long-term participation in the community. We found that members frequently change roles over their history, from ones that seek resources to ones offering help, while the distribution of roles is stable over the community's history. Adopting certain roles early on predicts members' continued participation in the community. Our methodology will be useful for facilitating better use of members' skills and interests in support of community-building efforts.

Keywords: Online Health Communities; Social Roles; Social Support.

Figures

Figure 1:

The percentage of different role occupations

Figure 2:

The percentage of role occupation for users by their CSN tenure among user who participated in CSN for at least a year. (0, 1] refers to members’ first month in CSN, (1, 6] refers to their second to sixth month, (6, 12] refers to their six months to one year and (12, +) refers to after one year.

Figure 3:

Conditional probability of role transitions from one session (row) to another after the first (left) and tenth (right) session.