Diverse needs and cooperative deeds: Comprehending users’ identities in online health communities

作者：

Highlights：

• Elaborating on the communication theory of identity (CTI), this study proposed a multi-layered framework to analyze different layers of user identity portrayed in online health communities.

• The personal-layer identities appearing in an online health community comprise patients, partners, offspring, parents, friends and relatives, and others.

• The proposed detection models with logistic regression method for various personal-layer identities were validated on a real-world dataset and achieved F1-scores above 0.88.

• The features of enactment-layer identities differed significantly among users with diverse personal-layer identities in terms of both behaviors and communication needs.

摘要

•Elaborating on the communication theory of identity (CTI), this study proposed a multi-layered framework to analyze different layers of user identity portrayed in online health communities.•The personal-layer identities appearing in an online health community comprise patients, partners, offspring, parents, friends and relatives, and others.•The proposed detection models with logistic regression method for various personal-layer identities were validated on a real-world dataset and achieved F1-scores above 0.88.•The features of enactment-layer identities differed significantly among users with diverse personal-layer identities in terms of both behaviors and communication needs.

论文关键词：Online health community,User identity,Health communication,Communication theory of identity

论文评审过程：Received 21 January 2022, Revised 16 July 2022, Accepted 7 August 2022, Available online 19 August 2022, Version of Record 19 August 2022.

论文官网地址：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2022.103060