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Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand the Knowledge Sharing Behaviour of Practitioners in a Clinical Online Discussion Forum
BACKGROUND: Knowledge Translation (KT) plays a vital role in the modern health care community, facilitating the incorporation of new evidence into practice. Web 2.0 tools provide a useful mechanism for establishing an online KT environment in which health practitioners share their practice-related k...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Gunther Eysenbach
2012
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3799555/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23211783 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/jmir.1982 |
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author | Stewart, Samuel Alan Abidi, Syed Sibte Raza |
author_facet | Stewart, Samuel Alan Abidi, Syed Sibte Raza |
author_sort | Stewart, Samuel Alan |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Knowledge Translation (KT) plays a vital role in the modern health care community, facilitating the incorporation of new evidence into practice. Web 2.0 tools provide a useful mechanism for establishing an online KT environment in which health practitioners share their practice-related knowledge and experiences with an online community of practice. We have implemented a Web 2.0 based KT environment—an online discussion forum—for pediatric pain practitioners across seven different hospitals in Thailand. The online discussion forum enabled the pediatric pain practitioners to share and translate their experiential knowledge to help improve the management of pediatric pain in hospitals. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this research is to investigate the knowledge sharing dynamics of a community of practice through an online discussion forum. We evaluated the communication patterns of the community members using statistical and social network analysis methods in order to better understand how the online community engages to share experiential knowledge. METHODS: Statistical analyses and visualizations provide a broad overview of the communication patterns within the discussion forum. Social network analysis provides the tools to delve deeper into the social network, identifying the most active members of the community, reporting the overall health of the social network, isolating the potential core members of the social network, and exploring the inter-group relationships that exist across institutions and professions. RESULTS: The statistical analyses revealed a network dominated by a single institution and a single profession, and found a varied relationship between reading and posting content to the discussion forum. The social network analysis discovered a healthy network with strong communication patterns, while identifying which users are at the center of the community in terms of facilitating communication. The group-level analysis suggests that there is strong interprofessional and interregional communication, but a dearth of non-nurse participants has been identified as a shortcoming. CONCLUSIONS: The results of the analysis suggest that the discussion forum is active and healthy, and that, though few, the interprofessional and interinstitutional ties are strong. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3799555 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2012 |
publisher | Gunther Eysenbach |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-37995552013-10-22 Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand the Knowledge Sharing Behaviour of Practitioners in a Clinical Online Discussion Forum Stewart, Samuel Alan Abidi, Syed Sibte Raza J Med Internet Res Original Paper BACKGROUND: Knowledge Translation (KT) plays a vital role in the modern health care community, facilitating the incorporation of new evidence into practice. Web 2.0 tools provide a useful mechanism for establishing an online KT environment in which health practitioners share their practice-related knowledge and experiences with an online community of practice. We have implemented a Web 2.0 based KT environment—an online discussion forum—for pediatric pain practitioners across seven different hospitals in Thailand. The online discussion forum enabled the pediatric pain practitioners to share and translate their experiential knowledge to help improve the management of pediatric pain in hospitals. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this research is to investigate the knowledge sharing dynamics of a community of practice through an online discussion forum. We evaluated the communication patterns of the community members using statistical and social network analysis methods in order to better understand how the online community engages to share experiential knowledge. METHODS: Statistical analyses and visualizations provide a broad overview of the communication patterns within the discussion forum. Social network analysis provides the tools to delve deeper into the social network, identifying the most active members of the community, reporting the overall health of the social network, isolating the potential core members of the social network, and exploring the inter-group relationships that exist across institutions and professions. RESULTS: The statistical analyses revealed a network dominated by a single institution and a single profession, and found a varied relationship between reading and posting content to the discussion forum. The social network analysis discovered a healthy network with strong communication patterns, while identifying which users are at the center of the community in terms of facilitating communication. The group-level analysis suggests that there is strong interprofessional and interregional communication, but a dearth of non-nurse participants has been identified as a shortcoming. CONCLUSIONS: The results of the analysis suggest that the discussion forum is active and healthy, and that, though few, the interprofessional and interinstitutional ties are strong. Gunther Eysenbach 2012-12-04 /pmc/articles/PMC3799555/ /pubmed/23211783 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/jmir.1982 Text en ©Samuel Alan Stewart, Syed Sibte Raza Abidi. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 04.12.2012. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Stewart, Samuel Alan Abidi, Syed Sibte Raza Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand the Knowledge Sharing Behaviour of Practitioners in a Clinical Online Discussion Forum |
title | Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand the Knowledge Sharing Behaviour of Practitioners in a Clinical Online Discussion Forum |
title_full | Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand the Knowledge Sharing Behaviour of Practitioners in a Clinical Online Discussion Forum |
title_fullStr | Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand the Knowledge Sharing Behaviour of Practitioners in a Clinical Online Discussion Forum |
title_full_unstemmed | Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand the Knowledge Sharing Behaviour of Practitioners in a Clinical Online Discussion Forum |
title_short | Applying Social Network Analysis to Understand the Knowledge Sharing Behaviour of Practitioners in a Clinical Online Discussion Forum |
title_sort | applying social network analysis to understand the knowledge sharing behaviour of practitioners in a clinical online discussion forum |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3799555/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23211783 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/jmir.1982 |
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