Information passing within social networks in health

In recent years, online social networks have become very popular with the vast usage of Internet connected computers, tablets and mobile devices. Social network is a social structure including individuals or organizations and different types of relationships such as friendship, common interests, work, city, etc. The main factor that separates online social networks and social networks is: in the online case, there is no face to face interaction between the nodes of the network. Since the 1970s, the role of social networks in terms of illness, distress, disease and disability; and in understanding how people identify and respond to these crises, has become a mainstay of social and behavioral science research [3]. In this thesis, we investigated trust relationships and information passing in online social networks that focus on health. There is a significant amount of related work in this area conducted on consumer choice prediction, consumer influence factors and information on eBay, Amazon and other early adapter big e-commerce Web sites all over the world. In this thesis, we particularly focused on the content of a Web site called doktorsitesi.com. This is the largest online social network in Turkey related to health that is managed by professionals. We collected data from this domain and investigated how the work on information passing in social networks can be used in this domain.