Researching emerging networks

Activities: Field research, social network analysis, monograph development

The power of community is not new, but the scale and reach has certainly changed with the advent of social media. An increasing about of attention is being paid to the power of peer to peer health networks, and the value of seeing participants as allies, rather than adversaries. I’ve watched online communities emerge for many years - initially through my work researching underserved and marginalized populations, and later through being an early adopter of social media (I’ve been on Twitter since 2006(!)).

For my dissertation, I conducted research exploring a novel online health community known as BCSM (which stands for breast cancer social media). I sought to examine the notion of patient centered care within the context of a public, online social network. This research also aimed to identify and describe essential characteristics within the selected community that may inform future development and support for patient centered healthcare. At its core, it looked at how social media – and more broadly, health information technology – is impacting ways we communicate about/engage in health.

While this research utilized Twitter, it wasn’t about Twitter. Rather, it was an investigation of how individuals brought together over a specific public social network use the medium to convene and converse. A signature element of social media is that it moves fast, and individual posts can get lost in a tidal wave of content. The relationships that form, however, remain. Identifying the value of these connections, and the attributes that help to create and sustain them, is what makes this work unique, and what provides information and insight for application in future contexts.

You can read the abstract, or the full dissertation if you like, here.

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