Abstract
Consumer health informatics is a relatively new and rapidly expanding area within the field of medical informatics. Central to this discipline is the importance of providing information and support to individuals (consumers) so that they can be empowered and take a central role in their own health and well-being.
The rapidly increasing prevalence of obesity is a phenomenon often referred to as the “obesity epidemic” (Obesity: preventing and managing the global epidemic. Report of a WHO Consultation. WHO Technical Report Series 894, WHO, Geneva, 2000). Literature suggests social networks to be one of the most important dimension of people’s social environment that may enable or constrain the adoption of health-promoting behaviors (e.g., The New England Journal of Medicine, 357:370–379, 2007; Social Science & Medicine (1982), 63:1011-1022, 2006). Using data collected in qualitative interviews and via a Facebook application, this research in progress provides first insights on the relationship between online social connections, health-related behaviors, and body weight.
An outlook is given on how the use of online social networks may facilitate appropriate health-related behaviors in the context of obesity.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Abraham, A., Hassanien, A. E., & SnáSel, V. (2009). Computational social network analysis: Trends, tools and research advances. Dordrecht: Springer.
Arnaboldi, V., Passarella, A., Tesconi, M., & Gazze, D. (2011). Towards a characterization of egocentric networks in online social networks. Retrieved from cnd.iit.cnr.it
Bahr, D. B., Browning, R. C., Wyatt, H. R., & Hill, J. O. (2009). Exploiting social networks to mitigate the obesity epidemic. Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.), 17, 723–728.
Borgatti, S. P., Jones, C., & Everett, M. G. (1998). Network measures of social capital’. Connections., 21, 27–36.
Bos, L., Marsh, A., Carroll, D., Gupta, S., & Rees, M. (2008). Patient 2.0 empowerment. In H. R. Arabnia & A. Marsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2008 international conference on Semantic Web & Web Services (pp. 164–167), Las Vegas.
Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 210–230.
BVDW. (2010) Social Media Kompass 2010/2011. Fachgruppe Social Media im Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW) e.V., Düsseldorf.
Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2007). The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. The New England Journal of Medicine, 357, 370–379.
Cohen-Cole, E., & Fletcher, J. M. (2008). Is obesity contagious? Social networks vs. environmental factors in the obesity epidemic. Journal of Health Economics, 27, 1382–1387.
Eysenbach, G. (2000). Consumer health informatics. BMJ, 320, 1713–1716.
Finkelstein, E. A., Trogdon, J. G., Cohen, J. W., & Dietz, W. (2009). Annual medical spending attributable to obesity: Payer-and service-specific estimates. Health Affairs (Project Hope)., 28, w822–w831.
Flick, U. (2009). An introduction to qualitative research. London: Sage.
Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2008). Estimating peer effects on health in social networks: A response to Cohen-Cole and Fletcher; Trogdon, Nonnemaker, Pais. Journal of Health Economics., 27, 1400.
Gershenson, C. (2011). Epidemiology and social networks. Sociological Methods, 22(1), 199–200.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. The American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360–1380.
Hammond, R. A. (2010). Social influence and obesity. Current Opinion in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Obesity, 17, 467–471.
Hopf, C. (2007). Qualitative interviews—ein Überblick. In: U. Flick, E. von Kardoff, & I. Steinke, I. (Eds.), Qualitative Forschung: Ein Handbuch (pp. 349–360). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag.
Huffman, S. K. (2011). BMI changes in Russian adults: The role of lifestyles and spousal relationships. Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, 2011 Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Accessed September 22, 2011, Available at: http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/102653/2/HuffmanAAEA2011.pdf.
Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons., 53, 59–68.
Kneidinger, B. (2010). Facebook und Co. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Lakon, C. M., Godette, D. C., & Hipp, J. R. (2008). Network-based approaches for measuring social capital. In I. Kawachi, S. V. Subramanian, & D. Kim (Eds.), Social capital and health (pp. 63–81). New York, NY: Springer.
Lewis, K., Kaufman, J., Gonzalez, M., Wimmer, A., & Christakis, N. A. (2008). Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com. Social Networks., 30, 330–342.
Ma, X., Chen, G., & Xiao, J. (2010). Analysis of an online health social network. In: IHI’ 10 (pp. 297–306), Arlington.
Madan, A., Moturu, S. T., Lazer, D., & Pentland, A. S. (2010). Social sensing. In Wireless Health 2010 on—WH ’10 (p. 104). New York: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1921081.1921094.
Mayring, P. (2000). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(2): Art. 20.
McNeill, L. H., Kreuter, M. W., & Subramanian, S. V. (2006). Social environment and physical activity: A review of concepts and evidence. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 63, 1011–1022.
MedStar Physician Partners/MedStar Family. (2007). Clinical guidelines on the identification, evaluation, and treatment of overweight and obesity in adults. Retrieved September 6, 2011, from http://www.medstarfamilychoice.com/documents/guidelines/obesity.pdf.
Moore, S. (2010). Social networks, social capital and obesity: A literature review. In L. Dubé, A. Bechara, A. Dagher, A. Drewnowski, J. Lebel, P. James, & R. Y. Yada (Eds.), Obesity prevention (pp. 673–685). San Diego: Academic Press.
Polke-Majewski, K. (2011). Cameron hat kein digitales Problem, sondern ein soziales. Retrieved from http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2011-08/grossbritannien-krawalle-cameron-twitter-facebook-scial-media/komplettansicht
Prochaska, J. O., Redding, C. A., & Evers, K. E. (2008). The transtheoretical model and stages of change. In K. Glanz, B. K. Rimer, & K. V. Viswanath (Eds.), Health behavior and health education: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 1–552). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Rostila, M. (2011). A resource-based theory of social capital for health research: Can it help us bridge the individual and collective facets of the concept? Social Theory & Health., 9, 109–129.
Schone, M. (2011). London riots: Blame Twitter—or BlackBerry Messenger? Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/london-riots-blame-twitter-blackberry-messenger/story?id=14255618
von Rohr, M. (2011). Die Revolution, die keine war. Retrieved from http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,742430-3,00.html
Wang, Y., Beydoun, M. A., Liang, L., Caballero, B., & Kumanyika, S. K. (2008). Will all Americans become overweight or obese? Estimating the progression and cost of the US obesity epidemic. Obesity., 16, 2323–2330.
Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1994). Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wefing, H. (2012). Wir! Sind! Wütend! Die Zeit, 3–5.
WHO. (2000). Obesity: Preventing and managing the global epidemic. Report of a WHO Consultation. WHO technical report series 894. Geneva: WHO.
WHO. (2011) World health statistics 2011. Available at http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat/2011/en/accessed dec 2012.
Wickramasinghe, N., Bali, R., Goldberg, S., & Troshani, I. (Eds.). (2012). Pervasive health knowledge management. New York: Springer.
Wilson, C., Boe, B., Sala, A., Puttaswamy, K. P. N., & Zhao, B. Y. (2009). User interactions in social networks and their implications. In: Proceedings of the fourth ACM European conference on Computer systems—EuroSys ’09 (p. 205). New York: ACM.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Durst, C., Viol, J., Wickramasinghe, N. (2014). The Role of Online Social Networks in Consumer Health Informatics: An Example of the Implicit Incorporation of Lean Principles. In: Wickramasinghe, N., Al-Hakim, L., Gonzalez, C., Tan, J. (eds) Lean Thinking for Healthcare. Healthcare Delivery in the Information Age. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8036-5_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8036-5_21
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8035-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8036-5
eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)