Abstract Health consumers are increasingly participating in consumer-to-consumer (C2C) online health communities (OHCs) to receive health-related support and to provide assistance and support to others. However, questions remain as to how individual OHC participants are affected by the relationships they have established within an OHC and how the content exchanged between OHC participants impacts individual-level health knowledge and attitudes. To address these open questions, we develop a model that integrates participant network position (i.e., structural social capital) in an OHC, informational and emotional support exchange, and downstream individual-level health knowledge and attitudes. Based on a panel dataset collected from nine chronic disease-focused discussion boards within an OHC platform, we find that structural social capital is indeed a significant antecedent to social support exchange within an OHC and, interestingly, that social support provisioning (i.e., proactively aiding others) has a stronger effect than social support receipt on health literacy and health attitude improvement.

中文翻译：

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培养参与者的健康知识和态度：以慢性病为中心的在线健康社区的计量经济学研究

摘要 健康消费者越来越多地参与消费者对消费者 (C2C) 在线健康社区 (OHC)，以获得与健康相关的支持并向他人提供帮助和支持。然而，关于个人 OHC 参与者如何受到他们在 OHC 内建立的关系的影响以及 OHC 参与者之间交换的内容如何影响个人层面的健康知识和态度的问题仍然存在。为了解决这些开放性问题，我们开发了一个模型，该模型将 OHC 中的参与者网络位置（即结构性社会资本）、信息和情感支持交流以及下游个人层面的健康知识和态度相结合。基于从 OHC 平台内的九个以慢性病为重点的讨论板收集的面板数据集，