A Comparative Study of Smoking Cessation Intervention Programs on Social Media

摘要

As an alternative to traditional face-to-face counseling and support group, social media has become a new venue for health intervention programs. Different online intervention channels have their own characteristics and advantages. This study focuses on comparing two types of online intervention channels, i.e., forum and Facebook page, for smoking cessation using social network analysis techniques. QuitNet is a popular online intervention program for smoking cessation. In this study, we collected data from QuitNet's forum and its Facebook group page and constructed two social networks, respectively. We analyzed and compared these two social networks with a focus on users' quit statuses and communication patterns in the two different channels.