Related papers: Different Length, Different Needs: Qualitative Ana…
Humans make decisions based on the information they obtain from several major sources, among which the comments of others in Internet forums play an increasing role. Such forums cover a wide spectrum of topics and represent an essential…
Providing mental health support for loved ones across a geographic distance creates unique challenges for the remote caregivers, who sometimes turn to online communities for peer support. We qualitatively analyzed 522 Reddit threads to…
Although there are millions of transgender people in the world, a lack of information exists about their health issues. This issue has consequences for the medical field, which only has a nascent understanding of how to identify and meet…
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20…
Discussion threads form a central part of the experience on many Web sites, including social networking sites such as Facebook and Google Plus and knowledge creation sites such as Wikipedia. To help users manage the challenge of allocating…
Mental health remains a significant challenge of public health worldwide. With increasing popularity of online platforms, many use the platforms to share their mental health conditions, express their feelings, and seek help from the…
The increasing reliance on online communities for healthcare information by patients and caregivers has led to the increase in the spread of misinformation, or subjective, anecdotal and inaccurate or non-specific recommendations, which, if…
Millions of people use online social networks to reinforce their sense of belonging, for example by giving and asking for feedback as a form of social validation and self-recognition. It is common to observe disagreement among people…
A growing number of people engage in online health forums, making it important to understand the quality of the advice they receive. In this paper, we explore the role of expertise in responses provided to help-seeking posts regarding…
The proliferation of social media platforms has afforded social scientists unprecedented access to vast troves of data on human interactions, facilitating the study of online behavior at an unparalleled scale. These platforms typically…
While prior work has investigated the benefits of online health communities and general purpose social media used for health-related purposes, little work examines the use of TikTok, an emerging social media platform with a substantial user…
For many, it can be intimidating or even impossible to seek professional medical help if they have symptoms of an illness. As such, some people approach platforms like Reddit or Quora for a community-based conversation in an attempt to…
A lack of information exists about the health issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people who are often excluded from national demographic assessments, health studies, and clinical trials. As a result, medical…
Many people struggling with mental health issues are unable to access adequate care due to high costs and a shortage of mental health professionals, leading to a global mental health crisis. Online mental health communities can help…
Since the uptake of social media, researchers have mined online discussions to track the outbreak and evolution of specific diseases or chronic conditions such as influenza or depression. To broaden the set of diseases under study, we…
Forum threads are lengthy and rich in content. Concise thread summaries will benefit both newcomers seeking information and those who participate in the discussion. Few studies, however, have examined the task of forum thread summarization.…
Long COVID represents an unprecedented case of patient-led illness definition, emerging through Twitter in May 2020 when patients began collectively naming, documenting, and legitimizing their condition before medical institutions…
Online health communities offer the promise of support benefits to users, in particular because these communities enable users to find peers with similar experiences. Building mutually supportive connections between peers is a key…
Informal dementia caregivers are those who care for a person living with dementia (PLWD) without receiving payment (e.g., family members, friends, or other unpaid caregivers). These informal caregivers are subject to substantial mental,…
Huge volumes of patient queries are daily generated on online health forums, rendering manual doctor allocation a labor-intensive task. To better help patients, this paper studies a novel task of doctor recommendation to enable automatic…