Understanding and Enabling Online Social Networks to Support Healthy Behaviors

Abstract

Recent advances in digital technologies invite consideration of social influence and social support as processes that are accomplished by global, flexible, adaptive, and ad hoc networks that can be created, maintained, dissolved, and reconstituted with remarkable alacrity. This presentation describes and empirically tests a multi-theoretical multilevel (MTML) model of the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting knowledge and social networks. The presentation argues that MTML insights based on understanding the social motivations to create links in online social networks should be used to design more effective social networks to support healthy behaviors. Specifically, these insights should be used to implement algorithms that make network recommendations that can serve as interventions to enhance and target social support and social influence within online networks such as smoking cessation communities. The insights we propose are derived from our study of large scale social networks within massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Enabled by advanced graphic and networking technologies, MMORPGs provide three-dimensional playgrounds for people to interact with one another. In this study, we analyzed activities in an MMORPG, Sony’s EverQuest II. We analyzed the entire network of 3140 players who were on one server (Antonia Bayle) from Aug 25 to Aug 31 2006. Of these, 2998 were from the US, 142 were from Canada. 2447 were males. We examined whether their geographic distance offline and their demographic similarity (or homophily) influence the likelihood of four online interactions: partnering, instant messaging, trading, and mailing. The results show that geographical proximity of distance and temporal proximity of time zones have a strong impact in players’ online behavior in creating relations. Individuals were 22.6 times more likely to link with others within 50 kms than from someone who was within 50 to 800 kms. In addition, homophily in age and game experience also had a strong impact on creating relations. However, there was no evidence of gender homophily in the virtual world. These results indicate that online social networks to support healthy behaviors should implement network recommendation algorithms that underscore the importance of connecting individuals who are geographically proximate as well as exhibit homophily on a variety of personal traits.