Abstract
Online depression communities give people additional opportunities to share their experiences and exchange social support to care for themselves in fighting against depression. We aimed to explore what drives patients to share in online depression communities. We used three dimensions of social capital (structural, relational, and cognitive) to explain their sharing behaviors. We further proposed that five factors (social interaction ties, a sense of shared identity, trust, expertise, and a sense of shared values) will have significant, positive effects on sharing behaviors and that there are differences among patients who have spent different lengths of time participating in online depression communities. We then chose a popular online depression community in China as our data source and obtained a dataset consisting of 31,440 posts from 197 members. Then, we employed panel data regression analyses to test all six hypotheses. The results revealed that all five factors had significant, positive effects (p < 0.01) on patients’ sharing behaviors, and the effects were significantly different across groups. Our empirical results help designers and managers of online depression communities take specific measures to facilitate community members’ access to social capital resources. Meanwhile, our results have implications for existing health management and e-health literature.
Highlights
This study attempts to understand the effect of social capital on information sharing in online depression communities, but it is concerned with the issue of whether social capital has a different effect on information sharing for those patients who have spent different lengths of time participating in online depression communities
There are significant differences concerning the effect of social capital on information sharing for patients who have spent different lengths of time participating in online depression communities
We further examined whether there were any differences concerning the effect of social capital on information sharing for patients who spent different lengths of time participating in online depression communities
Summary
Mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, have become more common. Among the various mental problems, depression is increasingly prevalent and has become a serious public concern. A recent report from the World Health Organization found that the number of people with depression increased by 18% from 2005 to 2015, and there are approximately 300 million people worldwide suffering from depression [1]. Depression is considered to be associated with a range of negative outcomes, including cognitive impairment, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicide [2]. A number of studies have indicated that social support is widely considered to be protective against depression [3], and a lack of social support presents a greater risk for depression
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