Ari-Matti Auvinen*, Aalto University / HEMA Institute, Espoo, Finland Track: Research Presentation Topic: Communities in health care Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-06-16

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Introduction
The peer users and their active participation are essential for health online user communities. The peers are providing important content, but they also provide mentoring, assistance and advice to tackle with daily issues as well as empathy and camaraderie. The peers can have different roles in online user communities, and a variety of complementary roles are also required for well-functioning online user communities.

Objective
The various member roles in online communities have been studied, but the specific nature of member roles in health online communities has not been widely discussed. The focus of this study was to determine and categorize essential peer roles and their associated activities based on the postings in health online communities.

Methods
The research sample included various Finnish health-related online communities ranging from patient organizations to social networking communities. The peer roles and activities were determined and categorized based on the analysis of the publicly visible content (i.e., visible to non-registered users) – which mainly consisted of individual postings – in online communities.

The main research method used was content analysis of the different postings. The research sample was constructed of six discussions in three online communities with 325 postings, which included 525 analyzed messages.

Results
Contrary to a body of existing research of peer roles in online communities, we did not classify one user to represent a certain role. Rather we emphasized that one user can have different roles, which might be displayed in a single posting. For example, in patient communities, a peer may provide practical medical information, practical advice for managing daily issues regarding health insurance as well as empathy towards another user in the same posting. Thus when taking the actual postings, and not the users, as the research approach, we could understand better the multiplicity and complementary characteristics of the various peer roles.

We identified four sets of key roles. The first set is called “content contributors” (authoring, enriching, commenting, validating, updating, rating, curating content). The second set is called “empathy and support contributors” (sharing experiences, guiding other users, supporting other users, well-wishing and encouraging other users). The third set is called “managers” (managing, moderating, facilitating, empowering the users and the online community as a whole). The fourth set is “enjoyers and users”, which are often invisible, as we were not following closely those users just reading the postings of the online communities. These roles are not exclusive with another, but complementary.

Conclusions
The narrowly-defined definition of roles can give a too simplified picture of the actual dynamics and complexity of online health communities. However, understanding the various roles in online health communities enables us to improve the work within these communities. Categorizing the roles to content contributors, empathy and support contributors, managers, and enjoyers and users can widen our understanding of the multiplicity of required roles for successful online communities.