Abstract
Online health support groups have been gaining prominence in supporting patients and their caregivers. However, it stays as a challenge to understand the role they play in the life of their members. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in utilizing sentiment analysis to explore the dynamics and impact of online health support groups. We present our sentiment analysis model designed for social media support groups and our preliminary results in utilizing the model to understand a Facebook support group for patients with Sickle Cell Disease.
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Notes
- 1.
Our data collection is approved by the University of Pittsburgh IRB and is with the permission of the owners of the group.
- 2.
A manually created lexicon (BL lexicon) for positive and negative word lists.
- 3.
The significant drop of activity is mostly due to the sad event of loss of one of the group leaders. The changes over time can be due to various internal and external factors that have not been necessarily considered in our study.
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Zheng, K., Li, A., Farzan, R. (2018). Exploration of Online Health Support Groups Through the Lens of Sentiment Analysis. In: Chowdhury, G., McLeod, J., Gillet, V., Willett, P. (eds) Transforming Digital Worlds. iConference 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10766. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_19
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