  Online health communities offer the promise of support benefits to users, in
particular because these communities enable users to find peers with similar
experiences. Building mutually supportive connections between peers is a key
motivation for using online health communities. However, a user's role in a
community may influence the formation of peer connections. In this work, we
study patterns of peer connections between two structural health roles: patient
and non-professional caregiver. We examine user behavior in an online health
community where finding peers is not explicitly supported. This context lets us
use social network analysis methods to explore the growth of such connections
in the wild and identify users' peer communication preferences. We investigated
how connections between peers were initiated, finding that initiations are more
likely between two authors who have the same role and who are close within the
broader communication network. Relationships are also more likely to form and
be more interactive when authors have the same role. Our results have
implications for the design of systems supporting peer communication, e.g.
peer-to-peer recommendation systems.

Human-Computer Interaction;Computers and Society