Online community development in the early stages: the life cycle model application to Medical Sciences Stack Exchange
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-11-2021-0345 |
| Published date | 13 May 2022 |
| Date | 13 May 2022 |
| Pages | 1214-1232 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
| Author | Hengyi Fu,Sanghee Oh |
Online community development in
the early stages: the life cycle
model application to Medical
Sciences Stack Exchange
Hengyi Fu
School of Library and Information Studies, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, USA, and
Sanghee Oh
Department of Library and Information Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul,
Republic of Korea
Abstract
Purpose –This study aims to investigate the nature and evolution of online communities in the early stages of
their life cycles. The authors analyze the topics of discussions in an onlinecommunity to identify issues related
to community development. The authors also compare the topics of exemplary questions that founding
members believed to be asked with the real questions based on members’information needs.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors use Medical Sciences Stack Exchange, a health Q&A
community of Stack Exchange, which requires four stages of development: definition, commitment, private
beta and public beta. The authors collect postings of discussions and health questions in the first three stages,
perform a content analysis of the postings and analyze the topics of discussions and health questions.
Findings –The authors find that the topics of discussions evolved dynamically with the issues of community
governance, role as a medical/health community,members and roles, content management, quality control and
community design. The authors also find that the real questions included more specific and diverse issues than
the exemplary questions that founding members expected.
Originality/value –Theoretically, this study tests the community life cycle model in an online community
that has explicit phase markers. The findings could shed light on community development and help prioritize
issues to solve and decisions to make in its early stages. Additionally, this study focuses on the challenges and
concerns in online health community building and solutions generated by collective efforts that could influence
health communications in online communities.
Keywords Online communities, Health Q&A, Life cycle models, Community building, Community survival,
Peer production, Health topics
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
People join online health communities to share information and find support from health
professionals or people with similar experiences (Ziebland, 2012). The increasing popularity
and various benefits of online health communities have been well recognized, including
providing health information (Gui et al., 2017;Oh et al., 2016) and social and emotional support
(Erfani and Abedin, 2016), encouraging health service provider–patient interaction (Chen
et al., 2020;Khurana and Qiu, 2019), improving the effects of medical care (Litchman et al.,
2018) and reducing public health disparities (Goh et al., 2016). Specifically, social web
technology helps connect the members of online communities and allows them to interact
with one another via various social media such as social networking, blogging,
AJIM
74,6
1214
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National
Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5A8043500).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2050-3806.htm
Received 20 November 2021
Revised 10 February 2022
Accepted 27 March 2022
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 74 No. 6, 2022
pp. 1214-1232
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-11-2021-0345
microblogging, creating social reviews and recommendations, and asking and answering
questions.
In reality, building and maintaining an online community, however, is challenging
because most never really get off the ground. Indeed, even if they are able to overcome initial
challenges, they still need to survive over time in an often competitive environment (Wiggins
and Crowston, 2010). While people initially join online health communities for different
reasons, such initial visits do not guarantee continued participation in the long term. A higher
possibility of member loss is often expected in the community’s early stages since switching
communities at that time costs much less for members (Chomutare et al., 2012). Previous
research has suggested that many of the abovementioned benefits of participating in online
health communities come with members’sustained participation (Mo and Coulson, 2010).
Therefore, keeping the community alive and retaining users is a major challenge for online
health communities (Zhang, 2016;Zhang and Elhadad, 2016).
An extensive body of the literature has proposed community design principles and
guidelines derived from different concepts and theories of sociology, psychology,
management and economics (Kim, 2006). However, there is a dearth of research on the
community development process based on communities’life cycles, especially in their early
stages (Resnick et al., 2012). Community development requires different tools, features,
mechanisms, technologies and management strategies in each stage of the life cycle because
members’activities and needs change as the community evolves (Iriberri and Leroy, 2009). In
particular, in the startup stage, the community’s structure and membership as well as value
are more uncertain than that after it reaches maturity. The scope of the community, target
user groups, activities it supports, and purpose as well as the norms and governance to
achieve that purpose may still be under discussion among its early-stage members.
Based on the foregoing, our empirical study examines the evolution of community
building, especially in the early stages. We investigate the topics discussed among members
ranging from preparing an online health community to launching it. For the theoretical
framework, we apply the life cycle model to observe and analyze the phenomena and
activities in the early stages of Medical Sciences Stack Exchange, a health Q&A community
on Stack Exchange. We propose the following research questions:
(1) What is the background of founding members who were committed in the early
stages of an online health community?
(2) What topics do founding members discuss while building an onl ine health
community in the early stages of its life cycle? How do these topics change as the
stages evolve?
(3) What topics did the founding members anticipate being asked about in the
community? How different are the topics from those later raised by the members?
Stack Exchange, a social question-answering service, requires an online community to work
through several stages and move from one stage to another from definition,commitment,
private beta,topublic beta before it is officially launched to control quality and test its
sustainability for the long term. Once it passes the approval in public beta, the online
community can be launched. We focus on the early stages (definition,commitment and private
beta) of community building on Medical Sciences Stack Exchange. We first review life cycle
models and related studies and analyze how those models are applied to explain the evolution
of online health communities and define the early stages. We find that Iriberri and Leroy’s
(2009) community life cycle model is representative and usable for analyzing the online
community development mechanism of Stack Exchange. We carry out content analyses of
the discussions on Medical Sciences Stack Exchange that founding members have posted to
Online
community
development
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