A Study of Social Interactions in Online Health Communities

E-patients and caregivers are actively using social media to look for helpful health information and seeking support from their peers. In this work, we focus on the online health social networking site, Med Help, and study the associations between the social network structures of three different computer mediated communication (CMC) formats in this site. The three computer mediated communication formats are namely forum, journal and note. The result in our study shows that there are relatively stronger correlations between journal and note but there is either no correlation or weak correlation between forum and journal.