Exploring Dynamics of Facebook Health Support Groups: a Leadership Perspective

Abstract

Online health support groups are among the most popular Internet groups, being employed daily to share and seek health-related information, support, and advice. The leaders of these groups often employ various strategies to encourage and regulate participation. In this work, using a mixed methods data collection and research methodology, we follow a health support group leadership framework to examine how the organic peer-leadership strategies grows in two distinct Facebook groups, both dedicated to patients with Sickle Cell Disease. Our results highlight how these organic leadership strategies follow the standard leadership frameworks in more traditional context. Our results also shows that different leadership strategies lead to different group dynamics in terms of level of interaction and content of the discussions.