title: Towards Evaluating and Enhancing the Reach of Online Health Forums for Smoking Cessation.
abstract: Online pro-health social networks facilitating smoking cessation through web-assisted interventions have flourished in the past decade. In order to properly evaluate and increase the impact of this form of treatment on society, one needs to understand and be able to quantify its reach, as defined within the widely-adopted RE-AIM framework. In the online communication context, user engagement is an integral component of reach. This paper quantitatively studies the effect of engagement on the users of the Alt.Support.Stop-Smoking forum that served the needs of an online smoking cessation community for more than ten years. The paper then demonstrates how online service evaluation and planning by social network analysts can be applied towards strategic interventions targeting increased user engagement in online health forums. To this end, the challenges and opportunities are identified in the development of thread recommendation systems using core-users as a strategic resource for effective and efficient spread of healthy behaviors, in particular smoking cessation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Stearns
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Siddhartha
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nambiar
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nikolaev
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematical Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Semenov
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Rochester, Roshester, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: McIntosh
keywords: RE-AIM framework; engagement; intervention modeling; online forum communication; reach; smoking cessation; social network analysis