社会支持视角中的健康传播：对患者网络社群的经验考察

网络社区已经成为疾病患者或健康风险群体寻求社会支持的重要传播渠道。文章以最大的中文网络抑郁症社群——抑郁症百度贴吧为例,对其中的1894条帖文及其互动信息进行内容分析。研究发现,首先,在吧友发起的社会支持需求中,情感支持需求最为普遍;而在社会支持供应中,话题回应占据了最多比例。其次,尽管话题讨论能引起吧内成员最为热烈的讨论,但情感支持需求能带给发帖人更为丰富、多元的支持供应类型。最后,抑郁症吧中还存在一些独特的社会支持类型,比如讲述与记录等。与聚焦生理性疾病的网络支持社群不同,在聚焦心理、精神健康问题的网络社群中,与其他成员交换和分享情感、经历与故事,而非简单直接的信息求助,成为对患者最有力的社会支持。

Health Communication from a Social Support Perspective: An Empirical Study of Patient Online Communities

Online communities have become an important communication channel for the people with diseases or health risk to seek social support. This paper takes “Depression Baidu Tieba”,the largest Chinese online depression community, as an example to analyze the content of 1894 posts and interactive information. The results show that emotional support is the most common among the social support demands initiated by Tieba friends. In the provision of social support, topic response accounted for the largest proportion. Secondly, although the topic discussion can trigger the most heated discussion among the Tieba members, the need for emotional support can bring the posters a richer and diversified supply of support. Finally, there are some unique types of social support in Depression Tieba, such as “telling and recording”. Different from online support communities that focus on physical diseases, online communities that focus on psychological and mental health issues exchange and share emotions, experiences and stories with other members, rather than simply ask for information directly, becoming the most powerful social support for patients.