Collective Empowerment in Online Health Communities: Scale Development and Empirical Validation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The role of online health communities (OHCs) in patient empowerment is growing and has been increasingly studied in recent years. Research has focused primarily on individualistic conception of patients' empowerment, with much less attention paid to the role of OHCs in the development of patients' collective empowerment. Although OHCs have immense potential for empowerment that goes beyond the individual, the concept and scale of collective empowerment in OHCs have not yet been developed or validated.

Objective

This study aimed to develop an instrument for measuring collective empowerment in online health communities (CE-OHC) and to test its quality by investigating its factorial structure, reliability, construct validity, and predictive validity.

Methods

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SUBMITTER: Atanasova S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6893566 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature