How to Obtain Social Support in Online Support Forums? The Effects of Structural Social Capital and Politeness Principle
Published in Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication, 2021
Online support forum creates a public sphere for exchanging information and meaning. In these embedded virtual communities, users share collective identities and are driven by the same goals. They accumulate social capital through dynamic interactions with each other, and, in turn, construct their own discourses for seeking social support. Based on web-scraped data from an online depression forum, this study generated the network of users’ replies, aiming to investigate their communication and interactions in this social field through the lens of both structural and constructed social capital. On the one hand, users’ discussions either focus on information about depression, or expressions of emotions and feelings, the topics of which were found to be associated with their social capital: Compared with users in the information-based discussion, users in emotion-based discussion possessed more bonding and bridging social capital; the reply distribution in the information-based discussion was more skewed than that in the emotion-based discussion. On the other hand, the language people used when seeking support represented their psychological and cognitive process, and was found to be associated with the volume and quality of received social support: The use of informal language in the posts was positively associated with the number of users’ received replies; the use of first-person plural pronouns and words reflecting cognitive processing positively predicted the average length of received replies, while the use of informal words and the posts’ emotional positivity were negatively associated with the average length of received replies. This study not only offers practical guidance for users seeking support in online support groups or forums, but also promotes the development of China’s “Internet plus Health Care” campaign.
Recommended citation: Pan W., Liu D. (2021). How to Obtain Social Support in Online Support Forums? The Effects of Structural Social Capital and Politeness Principle. Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication . 43(4): 51-73.