You Get What You Give: Understanding Reply Reciprocity and Social Capital in Online Health Support Forums.

Adopting a social network analysis approach, the present study examined social capital and network dynamics of online support seeking and support provision in a depression forum. We constructed a depression forum network by mapping out all of the users and the reply ties among them. The findings showed a consistently reciprocal pattern between users' replies sent to others and replies received from others. Forum users' bridging social capital was positively associated with the source diversity of their received replies and negatively associated with the average length of their received replies. Furthermore, forum users' bonding social capital was positively associated with the average length of their received replies and negatively associated with the source diversity of their received replies.