Supporters in Deed - Studying Online Support Provision from the Perspective of Social Capital

The phenomenon of social support – aid and assistance exchanged through social relationships and interpersonal transactions – has been studied for decades with a focus on discovering the mechanism that lies between support exchange and personal wellbeing. In the age of the Internet, researchers also have shifted their focus to online support exchange. However, little attention has been paid to conceptualizing the determinants of support provision in virtual support communities. Drawing from social capital theory, this study attempts to bridge this gap by presenting a model that applies the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital to theorize the determinants of the provision of informational and emotional support in virtual support communities. Through the use of social network analysis and machine learning techniques, messages from a virtual support community for women with breast cancer are analyzed. The analysis results are used for empirically testing the framework modeling support provision.