Differences in Engagement Among BabyCenter.com Community Forum Contributors: A Pilot Study

For many women, online health communities, such as BabyCenter.com, provide mediums to quell doubts and receive answers amidst the pressing uncertainties of pregnancy [1]. Women contributing to such community forums often suffer from complications such as postpartum depression, and likely want their posts addressed in a timely and adequate manner. This work examined quantitative and qualitative factors that contribute to various levels of responsiveness to posts in BabyCenter.com post-partum depression online health communities. Our aim was to identify post characteristics conducive to higher levels of engagement from online health forum contributors. In this study, we analyzed characteristics of posts (length of the main text, time of day, existence of exclamation points or question marks in the title) to see if there was a relationship between the number of community comments (as a measure of engagement) and varying levels of the characteristics. The number of comments was used as a measure of engagement because it is an estimate of the extent to which community members were drawn to and felt compelled to interact with the post. For each of 100 randomly-selected posts (from 3 groups related to postpartum depression and anxiety), we generated summary statistics and performed two-sample t-tests. For the length of main post variable, a regression analysis was performed as well. In the end, we found no significant differences in engagement resulting from the three variables. For time of day, the average comments was 14.25 for AM posts, whereas the average number of comments for PM posts was 7.87. (p-value = 0.054, 95% CI: -0.11, 12.9, Figure 1). Length of the main post did not appear to predict level of engagement by online health community members (R2=0.0006, p-value=0.814, Figure 1). The difference in number of comments for posts with more than 148 words (median length) compared to posts with fewer than 148 words was also non-significant (p-value=0.58, 95% CI: -5.1, 2.8). Differences in engagement for posts with punctuation (exclamation point or question mark) in title (N=33) compared to those without (N=67) were non-significant (p-value=0.81, 95% CI: -4.0, 5.1) as well. (Figure 1) The strengths of this pilot study are in revealing characteristics that may appeal to users responding on online health community forums, it also sets the stage for future work investigating user behavior trends on social question and answering sites. The limitations include small sample size given our use of 100 randomly selected forum posts. Future work will assess larger data sets and examine more in-depth characteristics such as content and previous user behavior. For those participating in online health forum discussions, this research provides insight into factors that may foster a more reciprocal, communal environment for posting questions and comments. This process may lead to health benefits through providing better social support to posters managing postpartum depression [2].