Seeking and receiving social support on Facebook for surgery

Social Science & Medicine
Matthew A DavisScott D Pauls

Abstract

Social networking sites such as Facebook provide a new way to seek and receive social support, a factor widely recognized as important for one's health. However, few studies have used actual conversations from social networking sites to study social support for health related matters. We studied 3,899 Facebook users, among a sample of 33,326 monitored adults, who initiated a conversation that referred to surgery on their Facebook Wall during a six-month period. We explored predictors of social support as measured by number of response posts from "friends." Among our sample, we identified 8,343 Facebook conversation threads with the term "surgery" in the initial post with, on average, 5.7 response posts (SD 6.2). We used a variant of latent semantic analysis to explore the relationship between specific words in the posts that allowed us to develop three thematic categories of words related to family, immediacy of the surgery, and prayer. We used generalized linear mixed models to examine the association between characteristics of the Facebook user as well as the thematic categories on the likelihood of receiving response posts following the announcement of a surgery. Words from the three thematic categories were used in 32.5% (f...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jan 31, 2016·Qualitative Health Research·Martin Salzmann-Erikson, Duygu Hiçdurmaz
Apr 24, 2018·Health Communication·Anne Oeldorf-HirschJohn L Christensen
Mar 26, 2019·Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA·Zhijun YinBradley A Malin
Jun 23, 2020·Journal of Medical Internet Research·Celeste Campos-Castillo, Linnea I Laestadius
Nov 2, 2017·Journal of Medical Internet Research·Sunny Jung KimAmarendra K Das
Oct 10, 2019·Journal of Medical Internet Research·Yahya AlbalawiJim Buckley
Feb 26, 2020·Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking·Sigal Tifferet

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