Social support in online healthcare social networking

Online journals let patients share their thoughts and to easily seek support from friends by overcoming geographic and time boundaries. 3 months of journals and comments previously collected by a web crawler from Medhelp's alcoholism community were examined for social support types. Content analysis using social support defined by related literature shows that most journal posts provided information and sought more emotional support. Comments tend to offer informational support and request very minimal support. This work is a piece of an ongoing project that identifies the communication patterns of patients in online support groups