title: Communication network analysis in maternity hospital bulletin board system.
abstract: Recent changes in Japanese social environments consequently dropped total fertility rate, and poor interpersonal relationships in local communities have aggravated the environments for childbirth and child-rearing. Under such circumstances, we introduced a bulletin board system (BBS) to an official web-site of a maternity hospital to set up a community for its patients for communication regarding childbirth and the like. Based on the logs from BBS, we graphed types of communication among its users with to describe topologies. Additionally, we calculated degrees of centralization of entire networks and found the hospital role as the administrator becomes smaller as inter-user communication becomes more brisk. The analysis of contents of respective threads also revealed that main topics shifted from gestational matters to postnatal and child-rearing as communication became more brisk, which indicates those postnatal users are also strongly conscious with gestational and progestational contents and contribute to supporting the entire BBS.
authors.affiliation: Division of Health Sciences, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, 1-7 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan. suto@sahs.med.osaka-u.ac.jp
authors.forename: Shunji
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Suto
authors.forename: Nobuyuki
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ashida
authors.forename: Terumasa
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Higashi
authors.forename: Hideo
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Takemura
authors.forename: Koji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kurimoto
authors.forename: Shiro
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Yorifuji
mesh_terms: D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005260:Female; D006771:Hospitals, Maternity; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D007564:Japan; D036801:Parturition; D011247:Pregnancy; D012944:Social Support