Social Support on Sina Weibo for People Living With HIV/AIDS in China

• In Event: Health Issues and Intercultural Communication Research

Abstract

People living with HIV/AIDS in China create an online support group (The HIV/AIDS Weigroup) on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Study 1 content analyzes all 7,215 messages posted in this Weigroup since its launch on January 18th, 2011 till September 14th, 2012. The analysis reveals that social support provisions are far more frequent than social support requests; moreover, informational support is the most dominantly requested and provided in this group. Study 2 further examines how social support exchanged in the HIV/AIDS Weigroup using social network analysis and MANOVA. It reveals main effects of both contact frequency and reciprocity on the amount of information support exchanged within each dyad. Moreover, dyadic partners with a high frequency of contact exchange a larger amount of emotional support than their counterparts. However, strongly reciprocal dyads do not exchange significantly more emotional social support than those dyads with a low level of reciprocity.

Authors

• Jingyuan(Jolie) Shi, Nanyang Technological U

• Liang Chen, Nanyang Technological University