Online Communities

Sproull, Lee

doi:10.1002/047148296x.tie128

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Online communities are aggregations of individuals in the cyberspace, where social relationships are mediated by highly personalised technology. Sproull (2003, p. 733) defined an online community as a:…”

Section: Health and Fitness Communities On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Health and fitness online communities and product behaviour

Dessart

Duclou

2019

JPBM

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Purpose This paper aims to determine the impact of online community participation on attitudes and product-related behaviour in the health and fitness sector. Design/methodology/approach Survey data are collected from 221 users of the social medium Instagram, members of the self-proclaimed health and fitness community (#fitfam). Data are analysed with structural equation modelling. Findings The study shows that online community identification and engagement significantly increase health environment sensitivity, resulting in heightened engagement in physical fitness and healthy product choices. Social implications Given the difficulty to remain engaged in pro-health behaviour and the growing impact of social media on young adults’ lives, these findings are encouraging. They show that online health and fitness communities provide a supportive environment in which consumers can identify and freely engage and a fertile ground to the development of health sensitivity and product-related behaviour. Originality/value The study advances knowledge on the role of social media and online communities in promoting health and fitness product behaviours and attitudes.

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Section: Health and Fitness Communities On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Health and fitness online communities and product behaviour

Dessart

Duclou

2019

JPBM

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“…Indeed, a current trend of Social Media is to offer members the opportunity to establish and join groups of people online by creating virtual communities based on similar interests. These virtual communities can be called Online Social Groups (OSGs) [36,40], and they model a set of users interacting in discussions about real-world events, hobbies, similar interests, etc. In OSGs people have the chance to discuss ideas, doubts or interests with a big number of people that would be otherwise difficultly reachable in real life or with other traditional communication systems, that are mostly dedicated to private, one-to-one ways of messaging [10,12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incremental communication patterns in online social groups

et al. 2021

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In the last decades, temporal networks played a key role in modelling, understanding, and analysing the properties of dynamic systems where individuals and events vary in time. Of paramount importance is the representation and the analysis of Social Media, in particular Social Networks and Online Communities, through temporal networks, due to their intrinsic dynamism (social ties, online/offline status, users’ interactions, etc..). The identification of recurrent patterns in Online Communities, and in detail in Online Social Groups, is an important challenge which can reveal information concerning the structure of the social network, but also patterns of interactions, trending topics, and so on. Different works have already investigated the pattern detection in several scenarios by focusing mainly on identifying the occurrences of fixed and well known motifs (mostly, triads) or more flexible subgraphs. In this paper, we present the concept on the Incremental Communication Patterns, which is something in-between motifs, from which they inherit the meaningfulness of the identified structure, and subgraph, from which they inherit the possibility to be extended as needed. We formally define the Incremental Communication Patterns and exploit them to investigate the interaction patterns occurring in a real dataset consisting of 17 Online Social Groups taken from the list of Facebook groups. The results regarding our experimental analysis uncover interesting aspects of interactions patterns occurring in social groups and reveal that Incremental Communication Patterns are able to capture roles of the users within the groups.

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