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Modeling the temporal evolution of an online cancer forum

Published: 11 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we present a model for temporal analysis of an online discussion group, also known as an online forum. We used a social network model and investigated an online melanoma forum in detail. Our overall goal is to develop methods that quantify the responsiveness of the interactions in online forums. In particular, we are interested in identifying the evolutional stages through which online forums transition. The evolutional stages show if a forum is growing, shrinking, or in a state of equilibrium. In the work we present here, we measured the creation of threads, the creation of responses and the number of new users, as well as the topology of the melanoma network across an eight-year timeframe in order to measure network activity. We defined a response function in terms of the number of threads receiving a response, the number of threads not receiving a response, and the delay in response time. We used the response function as an approximation of the discussion group's utility. We found three distinct evolutional stages over the eight-year period and a range of response levels, in some cases determined by the severity of the disease under discussion. Our findings have implications for both forum owners and members. Each can assess and subsequently adjust the level of online interaction to improve the usefulness of the forum. Further, the assessed activity level of a forum may be useful for online health seekers as they decide whether or not to join a particular forum.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
IHI '10: Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Health Informatics Symposium
November 2010
886 pages
ISBN:9781450300308
DOI:10.1145/1882992
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 November 2010

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Author Tags

  1. cancer forums
  2. methodology
  3. online medical discussion group
  4. online medical forum
  5. social network analysis
  6. temporal analysis
  7. topic identification

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IHI '10
IHI '10: ACM International Health Informatics Symposium
November 11 - 12, 2010
Virginia, Arlington, USA

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  • (2021)Annotating and detecting topics in social media forum and modelling the annotation to derive directions-a case studyJournal of Big Data10.1186/s40537-021-00429-78:1Online publication date: 27-Feb-2021
  • (2020)Multi-label Topic Classification of Patient Generated Content in a Breast-cancer Community ForumProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics10.1145/3418094.3418132(266-274)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2020
  • (2020)A Mixed-Method Approach to Understand and Improve Individual Participation Behaviour in Online Health CommunitiesProceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information Science and Systems10.1145/3388176.3388190(210-217)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2020
  • (2020)Public health and social mediaJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2424571:3(282-299)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2020
  • (2018)Inferring Community Structure in Healthcare ForumsMethods of Information in Medicine10.3414/ME12-02-000352:02(160-167)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2018
  • (2017)A Park or A HighwayProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/2998181.2998339(1304-1319)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2017
  • (2016)Understanding the sustained use of online health communities from a self-determination perspectiveJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2356067:12(2842-2857)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2016
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