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The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics of online health care communities and the impact of two-way online social support on customers’ well-being and patients’ quality of life, at different social exclusion levels.

An online survey in China’s Anti-Hepatitis B Online Community includes 326 respondents. A combined hierarchical regression analysis and structural equation model test the hypotheses.

Both receiving and giving online social support, as reciprocal altruism behaviors, enhance patients’ well-being. Receiving online social support influences psychological well-being most; giving has the largest impact on existential domains. Social exclusion boosts the benefits of giving online social support but attenuates the benefits of receiving it.

This research focusses on the effects of online social support among socially excluded patients. Extensions could rely on objective instead of subjective measures and alternative methodologies to test the underlying processes. Additional insights could derive from a bidirectional perspective.

Medical treatment institutions should leverage customer resources; health care providers should prioritize patients who feel socially excluded as effective online support providers. Health care community administrators can use several means to convince patients to contribute to communities.

Social support in online health care communities is a collaborative service that uses customers as service resources. This study explains the collaborative service and how customers feel about their bidirectional roles. It also extends reciprocal altruism research to a health information technology realm by systematically exploring how giving, vs receiving, online social support affects customers’ well-being.

Gamification elements have been increasingly used in online weight-loss communities to help users lose weight. The purpose of this paper is to systemically examine whether and how social interactions influence users’ continued participation in the context of online weight-loss competitions (OWCs).

This study empirically investigated sustained involvement in OWCs using a Cox proportional hazards model. Additionally, the research utilized a text-mining technique to identify various types of social support and explored their roles in sustaining participation behavior in OWCs.

Community response both within and outside OWCs positively influence users’ continued participation in OWCs. Moreover, whereas emotional support and companionship received within OWCs have a greater impact on users’ continued participation than informational support received within OWCs, informational support received outside OWCs has a greater impact on users’ continued participation than emotional support and companionship received outside OWCs.

This paper highlights users’ social needs in OWC engagement and provides empirical evidence on how different types and sources of social support influence continued participation behavior in OWCs. The research additionally provides management implications for online health community service providers.

The purpose of this study is to identify patient experience unique to online pharmacy services (OPS) based on the characteristics of OPS (i.e. interactivity and virtuality) and to reveal how patient experience is derived from OPS and thereby enhances patient adherence from both online social support and patient experience perspectives.

The Stimulus-Organism-Response framework was used to conceptualize this study; both primary and secondary data for 296 validated participants were collected on a real OPS platform. A structural equation modeling approach combined with partial least squares was employed for the quantitative analysis.

Social presence and user engagement can be identified as patient experience in the OPS context; online emotional support has a stronger association with patients' social presence than it does with patients' user engagement; patients' social presence has a stronger association with their medication adherence than it does with diet adherence, while patients' user engagement has a stronger association with their diet adherence than it does with medication adherence; patients' medication knowledge negatively moderates the relationship between user engagement and diet adherence.

This study identifies patient experience in accordance with unique characteristics of OPS, and it reveals the nuanced underlying mechanisms by which online social support is associated with patient experience and by which patients' experience is associated with their adherence. This study enriches the literature on patient adherence, patient experience and OPS, providing insights for healthcare providers, OPS designers and policymakers.

This paper aims to examine the service experience in an online support community of consumers to understand the nature of social support and how it is experienced and enacted by vulnerable consumers.

A netnographic study was conducted to examine vulnerable consumers’ participation in an online support group for weight management. The Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) program was used, and additionally data were coded using open coding. A hybrid approach to data analysis was undertaken using inductive and deductive methods.

The findings suggest online social support groups can be used as an online “third place” to support vulnerable consumers, with vulnerable groups engaging with the online support group differently than those in the normal weight group. Social support was also found to be bi-directional in nature.

This study only investigates one online support group. To gain deeper insights, other support groups should be examined over a longer period.

This paper demonstrates that transformative services have the hidden capacity to optimize their services to enable vulnerable consumers to co-create social support in a safe place, thus providing a non-judgmental environment with the end goal of improving their health and well-being.

Findings reveal how services can enable marginalization and stigmatization to be overcome and inspire social action through the use of online support groups.

This research is unique in that it used a netnography approach to examine how vulnerable consumers interact in an online service setting, reducing self-report bias and allowing for a natural research setting, thus allowing a unique understanding of how vulnerable consumers experience and enact social support.

Drawing on the taxonomy of patient empowerment and a sense of community (SoC), the purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors that impact the intention of the individual to continue using online social health support community for their chronic disease management.

A survey design was used to collect the data from multiple online social health support groups related to chronic disease management. The survey yielded a total of 246 usable responses.

The primary findings from this study indicate that the informational support – not the nurturant support such as emotional, network, and esteem support – are the major types of support people are seeking from an online social health support community. This research also found that patient empowerment and SoC would positively impact their intention to continue using the online health community.

This study utilized a survey design method may limit precision and realism. Also, there is the self-selection bias as the respondents self-selected themselves to take the survey.

The findings can help the community managers or webmasters to design strategies for the promotion and diffusion of online social health group among patient of chronic disease. Those strategies should focus on patient’s empowerment through action facilitating and social support and through creating a SoC.

An innovative research model integrates patient empowerment and a SoC to study patient’s chronic disease management through online social health groups to fill the existing research gap.

Online gaming offers avenue to connect with others producing social capital especially for individuals lacking in-real-life (IRL) social support; however, there is concerns related to mental health and depressive symptoms (DS). Virtually mediated social connections are particularly important during times of social distancing. This paper aims to investigate discussant networks established through an online gaming site and their possible association with DS and social support.

Participants (n = 40) recruited from an online gaming site reported DS, online and IRL social support, and site members with whom they discussed important life matters. Participants also reported topics of conversation discussed and reason for communication. Quadratic assignment procedure multiple regression was used to determined significant associations between network structure, DS and social support.

DS were significantly associated with online (ß = 0.39) and IRL social support (ß = −0.44). Online social support was significantly associated with network structural factors. Topics reported by members most often were bridging capital topics while topics reported by members in most recent conversation were bonding capital topics. Members mentioned bonding social capital concepts as motivation for conversation.

Building online relationships to provide bonding social capital could supply buffering effects for those feeling socially isolated during social distancing.

This paper is among the first to approach online gaming communication through social network analysis and qualitative analysis mixed method approach.

The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth how Web 2.0 (focusing on social media) contributes to create a better communication channel to provide information, support and assistance to patients. Social relationships of individuals on the Internet through social media have created added value for many industries. This phenomenon can be an opportunity for the health care industry, which has encountered huge challenges such as increasing demands, budget cuts, growing numbers of patients and more demanding patient expectations. Web 2.0 and social media have the potential value to make possible an increase in the productivity of modern health care and a reduction in cost to the central government. Social media introduces better channels of communication with patients to increase the value of e-health. Social media are building more social communities that empower patients to share their personalized health information and treatments.

Grounded on social support and transaction cost theories, this paper evaluates the current potential of social media to discuss values it can offer for the overall benefit of the health care industry.

The results show how the social relationship of individuals provides online social support and reduction of cost through social media, leading to the development of modern health care. Implications and limitations are discussed at the end of the paper.

The analysis results indicated that social media provides strong social support for patients who seek help online. Informational support and emotional support have been confirmed as two main dimensions of social support in online health care. It makes a contribution to the health care literature by extending it to online health care support in the context of social media. It may inform and provide some initial understanding to guide future research. In addition, this study indicates that social support theory and transaction cost are appropriate theoretical foundations for studies of online health care. This finding is very valuable, as it helps researchers to advance the understanding of how social media support online health care.

The authors empirically examined social capital factors affecting patients' social support acquisition with the aim of providing guidance to patients seeking social support online.

The authors used social network analysis to extract data about social capital factors from online health communities and text mining to identify forms of informational support and emotional support grounded in online, text-based communication. Moreover, the authors employed a random coefficient model to understand the dynamic influence of social capital factors on both informational and emotional support.

The results from the empirical analyses show that structural connections have a lasting impact on the acquisition of both types of support; that is, social connections developed in the past will have an effect on the future. For relational capital, strong ties were less important; the quantity of connections mattered more than the quality when acquiring informational support. The use of health-related language increased the amount of informational support acquired. Over time, patients gained increasing social support, which primarily came from the patients' historical threads, likely via searches from peers facilitated by accumulated social capital.

The authors' research adds to the literature on social capital and social support in online health communities by exploring how the three dimensions of social capital affect social support acquisition. The authors' research also contributes to the online health care literature by examining social support from a dynamic perspective. Practically, the authors' findings provide guidance for patients on what decisions to make to acquire more social support.

The primary objectives of the article are to systematically investigate the effects of differentiated functions of WeChat use (social use and recreational use) on university students' online self-presentation, social support and sense of belonging.

The data were collected from a web-based survey on a sample of 485 university students in mainland China. Correlation analyses and structural equation modeling (SEM) were implemented to address the corresponding hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that the social use of WeChat is positively related to online self-presentation, whereas recreational use is unrelated to such behavior. Additionally, the findings verify that online self-presentation is a significant predictor of both social support and sense of belonging. Furthermore, online self-presentation could mediate the influence of social use of WeChat on social support and sense of belonging.

Theoretically, the study represents an initial effort to elucidate the joint impact of differentiated functions of WeChat use and online self-presentation on social support and sense of belonging. Practically, these findings identify the crucial mediation role of online self-presentation in assisting individuals to acquire social support and promote sense of belonging.

Although mobile social media has brought dramatic revolutions in interaction and interpersonal behaviors, the empirically studies regarding the potential influences of its utilization are equivocal. These outcomes may shed meaningful light on the comprehending of unique characteristics of WeChat communication and how it could impact people's psychosocial development in the digital era.

The emergence of Web 2.0 opened a new route for education to use the values derived from this development. The future of e-learning is social learning, where individuals can learn online due to the facility of social media. Social media such as online communities are places for social interactions between users. These social interactions are the way forward and can drive social support in an online context. This paper aims to explore the impact of these interactions

This study uses social support theory to explore the impact of social interactions on the internet on learning and education. The research uses a case study and investigates the health industry.

The paper explains the development in e-learning through social media and the emerging concept of social learning.

The contribution of this research is to emphasise social relationships of individuals in the internet and social interaction in online communities which enhance their learning qualities. The research drawn on social support theory describes social learning as a future for e-learning.