Interactions Between Cancer Patients In An online Health Community

Abstract

Many people who have cancer use online health communities as a space to support one another during the course of their illness. The different kinds of support that people seek out can change over time. In this study, we employ a taxonomy to categorize the different phases that people with cancer experience in order to explore the ways that cancer patients interact with each other on a specific online health community. We focus specifically on when and with whom users interact with and how that changes across different phases in the cancer journey. We find that being in the same phase does not predict whether one user will interact with another user, which implies that there are other dynamics involved. One of the dynamics that we find is that community members who no longer have evidence of disease interact more frequently with new members who have been recently diagnosed, which aligns with prior work on the subject of mentorship. We connect these findings to implications for design of online health communities and directions for future research in this area.