Ontological Analysis of the Research on the Use of Social Media for Health Behavior Change

This research provides a comprehensive view of the use of social media for health behavior change, leading to improved stress management, participation in health services, weight management, addiction recovery, screening & treatment behaviors for women, and sexual behaviors. We develop an ontological framework that encompasses 833 problem statements, and we use the framework to perform a meta-synthesis of the extant literature and map it. The results describe the state-of-research and highlight the bright, light, and blind/blank areas in the domain. We discuss the implications of our framework and the meta-synthesis. We show that the ontological framework provides a new lens to explore the issues in the domain. Our analysis reveals that the current state-of-research is saturated with bright areas such as cross sectional assessment of social media content and usage for health behavior change, while it lacks attention to blind/blank areas such as non-usage of several social media features. We conclude with open research questions and a discussion of limitations of our research.