Do Informational and Emotional Elements Differ between Online Psychological and Physiological Disease Communities in China? A Comparative Study of Depression and Diabetes

Zhizhen Yao, Zhenni Ni, Bin Zhang and Jian Du
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Zhizhen Yao: School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Zhenni Ni: School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Bin Zhang: School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Jian Du: National Institute of Health Data Science, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 4, 1-21

Abstract: Disease-specific online health communities provide a convenient and common platform for patients to share experiences, change information, provide and receive social support. This study aimed to compare differences between online psychological and physiological disease communities in topics, sentiment, participation, and emotional contagion patterns using multiple methods as well as to discuss how to satisfy the users’ different informational and emotional needs. We chose the online depression and diabetes communities on the Baidu Tieba platform as the data source. Topic modeling and theme coding were employed to analyze discussion preferences for various topic categories. Sentiment analysis was used to identify the sentiment polarity of each post and comment. The social network was used to represent the users’ interaction and emotional flows to discover the differences in participation and emotional contagion patterns between psychological and physiological disease communities. The results revealed that people affected by depression focused more on their symptoms and social relationships, while people affected by diabetes were more likely to discuss treatment and self-management behavior. In the depression community, there were obvious interveners spreading positive emotions and more core users in the negative emotional contagion network. In the diabetes community, emotional contagion was less prevalent and core users in positive and negative emotional contagion networks were basically the same. The study reveals insights into the differences between online psychological and physiological disease communities, providing a greater understanding of the users’ informational and emotional needs expressed online. These results are helpful for society to provide actual medical assistance and deploy health interventions based on disease types.

Keywords: online disease community; emotional contagion; topic mining; sentiment polarity; social network analysis; chronic disease (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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