Investigating social network patterns within an empathic online community for older people

Authors:
Ulrike Pfeil;Panayiotis Zaphiris
Affiliations:
Centre for HCI Design City University, London, UK;Cyprus University of Technology, Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Lemesos, Cyprus
Venue:
Computers in Human Behavior
Year:
2009

Citing 5
Cited 11

For a social network analysis of computer networks: a sociological perspective on collaborative work and virtual community

SIGCPR '96 Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGCPR/SIGMIS conference on Computer personnel research
Empathic communities: reaching out across the Web

interactions
Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek

Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek
Trends, similarities, and differences in the usage of teen and senior public online newsgroups

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Patterns of empathy in online communication

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Enhancing social network analysis with a concept-based text mining approach to discover key members on a virtual community of practice

KES'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Knowledge-based and intelligent information and engineering systems: Part II
Topic-based social network analysis for virtual communities of interests in the Dark Web

ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics
Topic-based social network analysis for virtual communities of interests in the dark web

ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
Leveraging Social Network Analysis with Topic Models and the Semantic Web

WI-IAT '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 03
Distributed Teaching Presence and communicative patterns in asynchronous learning: Name versus reply networks

Computers & Education
Simulation of user participation and interaction in online discussion groups

MSM'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Modeling and Mining Ubiquitous Social Media
How do e-patients connect online? a study of social support roles in health social networking

SBP'13 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction
Persuasive dialogue for older adults: promoting and encouraging social interaction

CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Perceived bridging and bonding social capital on Twitter: Differentiating between followers and followees

Computers in Human Behavior
An Interpersonal Relationship Framework for Virtual Community Participation Psychology: From Covert to Overt Process

Social Science Computer Review
Leveraging social network analysis with topic models and the Semantic Web extended

Web Intelligence and Agent Systems - Web Intelligence and Communities

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we study the social network structure of an online discussion board within SeniorNet, an empathic online community for older people. We apply Social Network Analysis (SNA) to analyse the communication patterns and relationships between members of the discussion board. In addition to looking at the structure of the exchanged messages within the discussion board as a whole, we also investigate associations between the communication content and the social network patterns. Our findings show distinct differences between the social network patterns of empathic and non-empathic communications. For example, members are more connected and closer to each other in the social networks that are based on empathic communication compared to non-empathic communication. Additionally our results show that the type of empathic communication (e.g. different kinds of support) is linked to the social network structure within the discussion board.