Background The positive effect of breastfeeding on the health of the mother, child and community has been globally accepted, but the rate of breastfeeding is still not at an acceptable level. Breastfeeding support can greatly influence the continuity and success of breastfeeding. This qualitative study aimed to explain the Iranian women’s experiences of breastfeeding support. Materials and Meth...

BACKGROUND Health promotion volunteers (HPVs) who are expected to function as leaders in promoting community health in Japan feel both satisfaction and burden associated with their community engagement activities. The purposes of this study were 1) to describe the prevalence of volunteers with differing levels of activity satisfaction and burden; 2) to examine the association between satisfacti...

Community integration is one of the most important as well as most frequently identified goals of rehabilitation and habilitation for people with disabilities. Although rehabilitation professionals have identified community integration as an important goal, the role of community leisure ser vice providers in this process has not been as clear. This article offers the core ideas associated with ...

This paper identifies and analyses characteristics of Patients’ Online Communities (POC) in Sweden. The purpose of the paper is to increase our understanding of how individuals design online social support and how this can inform design in a wider perspective. The study presents a fine-grained picture of POC covering both the contextual structures and the community culture. Two important drivin...

This work develops a technology for knowledge evolution course (KEC) discovery in professional virtual communities as a decision support mechanism to discover effectively the KEC hidden inside of a professional virtual community, which can guide community members to retrieve required empirical knowledge quickly. This objective can be obtained by performing the following tasks: (i) design of an ...

A new phenomenon emerging within virtual communities is a blurring between social and commercial activities. This paper explores the motivations of customers who participate in social commerce, The chosen context is micro-businesses operated by members of a virtual community of Malay lifestyle bloggers. Observations were carried out and 21 participants were interviewed in order to build an unde...

Virtual communities provide an attractive place for organizations to mine information regarding customer perceptions, needs, and demographics; as well as to generate revenue through sales of products, services, information, and advertising. However, the community conversation provides information about only one type of community user, the poster. Information about the lurker, who never posts, i...

Online health communities (OHCs) have become a major source of social support for people with health problems. Members of OHCs interact online with those who face similar problems and are involved in different types of social supports, such as information support, emotional support and companionship. Using a case study of an OHC among breast cancer survivors, we first use machine learning techn...

In this paper we cluster and analyse temporal user behaviour in online communities. We adapt a simple unsupervised clustering algorithm to an evolutionary setting where we cluster users into prototypical behavioural roles based on features derived from their ego-centric reply-graphs. We then analyse changes in the role membership of the users over time, the change in role composition of forums ...