The Formation of Reciprocal Social Support in Online Support Groups: A Network Modeling Approach

In online support groups (OSGs), individuals build social connections in order to grant social support, especially reciprocal social support. Much research has been done around the support exchange behaviors and the content of support. Few have investigated the formation of reciprocal social support, especially in the context of social embedding where the social networks evolve. In this article, we aim to explain how reciprocal social support forms by testing and integrating the social science hypotheses into the modeling of the outside social networks. A series of simulation experiments have been conducted to test our hypotheses and the proposed models. The results show that our proposed models can well capture the reciprocal properties observed in real-world social networks, and our hypotheses can collectively explain the formation of reciprocal social support. By hypothesizing user behaviors of support exchange and modeling the outside social networks, our study advances the understanding of how users participate in online groups, either to give more or to receive more support.