Social support in an Internet weight loss community

By Kevin O. Hwang, A. Ottenbacher, Angela P. Green, M. R. Cannon-Diehl, Oneka Richardson, Elmer Victor Bernstam, Eric J. Thomas. Int. J. Medical Informatics, 2009

374 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose To describe social support for weight loss shared by members of a large Internet weight loss community. Methods We conducted a mixed-methods study with surveys (n = 193) and interviews (n = 13) of community members along with a content analysis of discussion forum messages (n = 1924 messages). Qualitative data were analyzed for social support themes. Results Survey respondents were primarily white (91.4%) and female (93.8%) with mean age 37.3 years and mean body mass index 30.9. They used forums frequently, with 56.8% reading messages, 36.1% replying to messages, and 18.5% posting messages to start a discussion related to weight loss on a daily or more frequent basis. Major social support themes were encouragement and motivation, mentioned at least once by 87.6% of survey respondents, followed by information (58.5%) and shared experiences (42.5%). Subthemes included testimonies, recognition for success, accountability, friendly competition, and humor. Members valued convenience, anonymity, and the non-judgmental interactions as unique characteristics of Internet-mediated support. Conclusion This Internet weight loss community plays a prominent role in participants’ weight loss efforts. Social support within Internet weight loss communities merits further evaluation as a weight loss resource for clinicians to recommend to patients. Understanding these communities could improve how health professionals evaluate, build, harness, and manipulate social support for weight loss.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/371de683829a44b63ca84086130224bcdf6ed4d6

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Citations in the corpus

Social commerce: The transfer of power from sellers to buyers (2015, background): “Virtual groups or communities are a group of individuals interacting in a social network due to common goals or interests, with social interaction occurring in an online context (Joon and Young-Gul, 2003).”
Social Networks, Interpersonal Social Support, and Health Outcomes: A Health Communication Perspective (2016, background): “Moreover, online support groups provide convenient connection with others in similar circumstances, ability to communicate anonymously, reciprocity of social support, and a judgmentfree space for people to share information about their health status (Hwang et al., 2010; Wright, 2015).”
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A New Dimension of Health Care: Systematic Review of the Uses, Benefits, and Limitations of Social Media for Health Communication (2013, background): “An important aspect of using social media for health communication is that it can provide valuable peer, social, and emotional support for the general public [37,43,44,47,48,51,56,73,101,108,114] and patients [28,33,34,44,47,48,56,60,62,68,71,76,88,98,120].”
Help me, I'm fat! Social support in online weight loss networks (2011, methodology): “We achieve this through a quantitative examination of users of the Weight Watchers Facebook page.”
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