Associations Between Support-Seekers' Cross-Community Interactions and Their Engagement with Received Comments in Online Health Communities

Shenghan Tan, Daiang Jia, Chunghiu Kong, Tianjian Liu, Zhenhui Peng

Support-seekers' active engagement with received comments, e.g., showing positive sentiment and willingness to improve in the replies, can indicate the success of online health communities (OHCs). Their participation in other communities may correlate with their engagement in OHCs but remains under-explored. This paper analyzes 26, 725 seekers' behaviors in the other 40, 479 communities and their associations with seekers' engagement with received comments under their 78, 501 posts in 30 Baidu Tieba OHCs. We found that seekers primarily posted in other communities that are also health-related (25.3%), followed by those about games and entertainment (e.g., Dota, 20.8%). Seekers who posted in other communities about health (26.3%) or personal issues (e.g., saving money, 20.7%) before had relatively higher probabilities of subsequently posting in the 30 OHCs we identified, but this posting experience was associated with fewer replies and less expressed willingness to improve based on received comments. We provide insights into fostering seekers' engagement in OHCs based on cross-community interactions.