在线互助论坛中如何获得社会支持:结构化社会资本与礼貌原则的影响

How to Obtain Social Support in Online Support Forums?The Effects of Structural Social Capital and Politeness Principle

在线互助论坛塑造了一种全新的信息交流与意义交换的公共空间。在此嵌入式的虚拟社区内,用户共享集体身份,为某种共同目标所驱动,并在与他人的动态互动中累积社会资本,建构自身的话语策略。基于从网页抓取的在线抑郁症互助论坛公开数据,本研究建立了论坛内用户的回帖关系网络,力图从社会资本的结构性与建构性两个层面共同讨论用户在此场域内的交流互动。一方面,用户间讨论话题或集中于疾病信息的传递,或侧重于情感层面的沟通,而两种讨论的议题特性与用户可摄取的资源间存在关联:同参与信息讨论的用户相比,参与情感讨论的用户拥有更多的黏连社会资本与桥接社会资本,同时前者的回复分布较之后者更为偏态,资源更为集中。另一方面,用户建构自身求助话语的方式展现着其认知与心理过程,而这与他们所获得的社会支持间存在着显著关联:发帖中的非正式语言使用正向预测收到回复的数量;发帖中体现认知加工程度的语言使用与第一人称复数代词的使用正向预测收到回复的平均长度,而非正式词语的使用和情感正向性负向预测收到回复的平均长度。本研究为在线互助小组或论坛用户寻求支持和帮助提供了实际指导,也为我国推动"互联网+医疗"的发展目标提供参考。

Online support forum creates a public sphere for exchanging information and meaning. In these embedded virtual communities, users share collective identities and are driven by the same goals. They accumulate social capital through dynamic interactions with each other, and, in turn, construct their own discourses for seeking social support. Based on web-scraped data from an online depression forum, this study generated the network of users’ replies, aiming to investigate their communication and interactions in this social field through the lens of both structural and constructed social capital. On the one hand, users’ discussions either focus on information about depression, or expressions of emotions and feelings, the topics of which were found to be associated with their social capital: Compared with users in the information-based discussion, users in emotion-based discussion possessed more bonding and bridging social capital;the reply distribution in the information-based discussion was more skewed than that in the emotion-based discussion. On the other hand, the language people used when seeking support represented their psychological and cognitive process, and was found to be associated with the volume and quality of received social support: The use of informal language in the posts was positively associated with the number of users’ received replies;the use of first-person plural pronouns and words reflecting cognitive processing positively predicted the average length of received replies, while the use of informal words and the posts’ emotional positivity were negatively associated with the average length of received replies. This study not only offers practical guidance for users seeking support in online support groups or forums, but also promotes the development of China’s "Internet plus Health Care" campaign.