Knee arthroplasty: Shared experience in a virtual community

There is no argument that the internet has become fundamental to living in contemporary society. Information once obtained secondhand from family, friends and acquaintances—the two-step-flow of communication—can now easily be found via the internet. Social science research has indicated that in any community there are individuals to whom others look for opinions and advice on various issues. This paper examines how opinion leadership, trust, credibility, and virtual community intersect in a confidential online health community formed around potential, pending, and completed knee replacement. Knee replacement surgery, or knee arthroplasty, is the most common joint replacement procedure performed today. Strength of weak ties also informs this research as information deemed more valuable to community members regarding knee replacement came from associations formed online rather than from one's more immediate strong tie relationships.;This mixed-method case study utilized Social Network Analysis (SNA), an online survey, and phenomenological interviews to understand how members of one such online community used information they gathered there. A mixed methods approach also helped extract accounts related to how being a member of this community shaped perceptions of an individual's condition and how they experienced the condition in and of itself.;Findings indicate that experiential proximity—impressions that the “other” has been through similar circumstances—generates perceptions of opinion leadership, trust, and credibility. Results indicate that how people use online health forums and what it is that attracts people to them is related to how effective forums are in helping users cope with a particular health condition. This study extends previous research by further demonstrating that peer-based information exchange is valued because of the experiential information available through relationships formed online. This inquiry contributes to current literature on health-related online forums by examining in more detail what motivates people to make use of these forums and linking this empirically to how effective people perceive these forums to be.