Understanding the role of social media in community resilience: a study of healthcare communities

Resilience is a core attribute of thriving and vibrant communities. It represents the capacity of a community for absorbing abrupt change and its ability for dealing with unexpected challenges. Resilience has become an important concept for understanding the relation between a community’s dynamics and its environment, including technology. The purpose of this study is to employ this concept to unpack the complex relationship between social media and community resilience, and build a theoretical understanding that represents the nature and dynamics of such a relation. Through an iterative and interlinked process of data collection and data analysis, a substantive theory of social media for community resilience emerged. ‘Affordances of Social Media, ‘Community Resilience, and ‘Social Media constraints’ are the three major concepts that underpin this theory. These concepts emerged through a rigorous process of coding and they are strongly grounded in empirical findings. The emerged theory is also interpreted and understood through the theoretical lens of sociomateriality, analytically generalised to a more abstract and formal level. Healthcare provides a fruitful context to this study as many aspects of healthcare activities, resonate strongly with the characteristics of community resilience. In particular, communities of patients and carers that form and emerge around chronic care management activities, provide rich settings for observing different dimensions of resilience and investigating the interaction between community resilience and social media. As such, this study focuses on the management of chronic disease to understanding the role of social media in the resilience of chronic care management communities. By taking an inductive and exploratory approach, this study provides a detailed and qualitative account of the role of social media in the resilience of chronic care management communities. Designed as an embedded case study, and informed by the grounded theory method, the study focuses on different chronic disease types. Three levels of open, selective, and theoretical coding provided the study with a detailed account of the nature and relations between social media and the resilience of chronic care management communities. This study makes theoretical contributions by building a theory of social media, presenting new concepts, and providing deep insight into the role of social media in communities and community resilience. It also has implications for practice by providing new insights into patients’ and carers’ communities. Further, the study has implications for research by creating new research questions and opening potential areas of investigation.