Week13_Goh, Gao and Agarwal (2016)_Aaron

The creation of social value: can an online health community reduce rural-urban health disparities?

Goh, Gao and Agarwal (2016) investigated the creation of social value in online health communities. The authors proposed that online health communities provide a forum that transcends geographic constraints, representing a supportive social networking resource to mitigate health disparities.

Adapting the framework of health capability (Ruger 2010), the authors theorized how disadvantages caused by location lead to health capability’s gaps, and create health disparity outcomes. They argued that online health communities attenuates such a process by exchanging social support from urban to rural members.

Using a unique data set from a rare disease community, they conducted quantitative analysis by exponential random graph models to discover patterns of social support exchanged between users and the variations in these patterns based on users’ location. They found that, urban users are net suppliers of social support while rural participants are net recipients. Their finding advances extant understanding of value creation in online collectives, and yields implications for policy.