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  • Collective empowerment in online health communities [Elektronski vir] : scale development and empirical validation
    Atanasova, Sara ; Petrič, Gregor
    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: The CE-OHC scale was developed according to a strict methodology for developing valid and reliable scales. Aninitial set of 20 items was first tested in the pilot study conducted in 2016 using a sample of 280 registered users of Slovenia's largest OHC. A refined version with 11 items was tested in the main study conducted in 2018 on a random sample of 30,000 registered users of the same OHC. The final sample comprised 784 users. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used to investigate the factorial structure, discriminant validity, and convergent validity of the scale.Cronbach alpha coefficient was used to determine the CE-OHC scale's internal consistency. To establish the predictive validity, ordinary least squares regression was performed to test the role of CE-OHC in users' civic participation. Results: The EFA resulted in a two-factor solution, and the two factors - knowledge of resources and resource mobilization for collective action - together explain 63.8% of the variance. The second-order CFA demonstrated a good fit to the data (root mean square error of approximation=0.07) and the scale had a good internal consistency (alpha=.86). Although evidence of the scale's convergent validity was partially provided, discriminant validity of the scale remained unconfirmed. Overall, CE-OHC was confirmed to be a predictor of users' civic participation, but the influence was somewhat weak and inconsistent across two subscales. Conclusions: The proposed CE-OHC scale is a reliable and relatively valid instrument and serves as a good baseline to advance the measurement of collective empowerment in OHC contexts. This is the first scale developed for this purpose, and future research should focus on the development of a clear nomological network of the collective empowerment construct in relation to the OHC settings.
    Source: Journal of medical internet research [Elektronski vir]. - ISSN 1438-8871 (Vol. 21, no. 11, Nov. 2019)
    Type of material - e-article
    Publish date - 2019
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 36474205

    Link(s):

    https://www.jmir.org/2019/11/e14392
    Repository of the University of Ljubljana – RUL
    DOI

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