title: Does sustained participation in an online health community affect sentiment?
abstract: A large number of patients rely on online health communities to exchange information and psychosocial support with their peers. Examining participation in a community and its impact on members' behaviors and attitudes is one of the key open research questions in the field of study of online health communities. In this paper, we focus on a large public breast cancer community and conduct sentiment analysis on all its posts. We investigate the impact of different factors on post sentiment, such as time since joining the community, posting activity, age of members, and cancer stage of members. We find that there is a significant increase in sentiment of posts through time, with different patterns of sentiment trends for initial posts in threads and reply posts. Factors each play a role; for instance stage-IV members form a particular sub-community with patterns of sentiment and usage distinct from others members.
authors.affiliation: Columbia University, New York, NY.
authors.forename: Shaodian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: University of Hawai'i Cancer Center, Honolulu, HI.
authors.forename: Erin
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bantum
authors.affiliation: VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Menlo Park, CA.
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Owen
authors.affiliation: Columbia University, New York, NY.
authors.forename: Noémie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Elhadad
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000523:psychology*; D066264:Datasets as Topic; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008875:Middle Aged; D012944:Social Support