The Diabetes Online Community: A Content Analysis of Return Members

Background: Social networking in the context of health is a fairly new phenomenon. The diabetes online community (DOC) is a way for individuals with diabetes, and their caregivers, to engage with others who have a vested interest in diabetes. The DOC encompasses diabetes specific social networking sites, general social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter), blogs, vlogs, and discussion boards. Different from medical advice, DOC users are generating peer-to-peer discussions about diabetes based on their own experiences. There is a lack of understanding about peer-to-peer health on disease specific social networking sites as it relates to value gained by the individual members. Objective: The purpose of this study is to why members of a DOC return to a diabetes specific social networking site. Methods: A content analysis was conducted on secondary data sampled from a discussion thread found on the diabetes specific social networking site, TuDiabetes.org. Content analysis is a method widely used in communication science to quantify and study characteristics of textually mediated sender-receiver interactions. Using a summative approach, data was counted and compared from a posteriori perspective to determine themes based upon word frequencies. Three programs were used to analyze the text: 1) Yoshikoder with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count dictionary with three added dictionary sections: emoticon, lab, and TuDiabetes, was used to generate categories and themes; 2) the General Inquirer was utilized to categorize text by tags to determine if the text is generally positive or negative, active or passive, and strong or weak; and 3) Wordle was used to create a word cloud to pictorially represent frequently used words. Results: There were 47 participants and 62 unique posts that were female dominated (74%). Discussions included both one-on-one and complex group conversations. The most frequently used words were Tudiabetes, diabetes, people, come, back, like, support, place, site, and learn. Three themes emerged: Medical (diabetes, treatment, healthcare, monitoring, food, new to diabetes, and no diabetes categories), The D-Life (I’m in control and it’s hard to have diabetes categories), and TuDiabetes is my Friend (place, learn and teach, positive environment, support, community, conversation, action, time shout outs, life, experience, fun and gratitude categories). The text was generally positive and spoke of strength and moral approval. Verbs used were more likely to give an interpretive explanation of an action or describe emotional states. Conclusions: This is the first study of its kind to shed some light on how individuals engaged with a diabetes online community value social networking. TuDiabetes was not seen as just a website, but viewed as a place, although not physical, with an active community. There appears to be a mutual sense of friendship among the members. In this study, the DOC represented a positive environment where teaching and learning took place, support was offered, empowerment was gained, and fun was had. This study looked at a small sample of text within TuDiabetes.org and is not meant to represent the ideas and feelings of the entire membership. []