9: PUI & Facebook

Although in its in its infancy compared to other online psychological spaces like porn and gambling sites I believe Facebook has the real potential for being a space online that could lead to Problematic Internet Use. PIU is defined by Caplan as problematic behavior related to spending too much time online which can result in maladaptive cognition and behaviors causing negative academic, work or social consequences. For those who need to have control or “to be in the know” about their social surroundings Facebook is a perfect match because it allows for a constant source of easily accessible information about individuals in your social network. Wallace says that the locus of control, or the degree to which one can have control over their circumstances, can have a great impact on problematic internet use. In the case of Facebook people have the ability to control what is listed in their profiles, they have the ability to tag/untag pictures, or even delete what someone has written on their wall. All of these features allow for a high locus of control and causing selective self presentation. One feature of Facebook itself is the existence of operant conditioning, which is when a behavior is rewarded on a variable schedule therefore making the behavior more difficult to extinguish. People who lack a social interaction in reality may turn to facebook for it, and because it is unknown when you will receive a wall post, friend request, or message there is this sense that you have to frequently keep checking to see who will interact with you and when. For some frequent checking may become obsessive checking.

I feel that Caplan’s model does apply here because those individuals that are experiencing psychosocial problems like loneliness may be more apt to have low social competence and therefore turn to a social networking site for interaction with others. Once people realize that they can feel comfortable interacting in a space like Facebook because of the affordances like anonymity, and less perceived risk they feel more efficacious because it’s less threatening then real social interaction. Once this preference for a less threatening type of interaction is established, and the individual has severe psychosocial problems there is a great possibility of excessive or compulsive use of a site like Facebook.

I believe that many of the spaces online that have the potential to lead to PUI, like gambling, porn or social networking sites have many similar properties like the ability to control actions or self presentation, anonymity and less perceived social risk. Facebook though is interesting and somewhat unique though because its basic premise revolves around a social network.

COMMENTS:

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8 AS3

I am a chronic procrastinator. I never read the assignment for this week until it was too late to get someone in the class to do it with me. So now I am having one of my roommates do this with me (and I owe him dinner now, too). When looking for a group for this assignment, I figured I should pick one that I can get some use out of, so I picked the alt.support.stop-smoking, or AS3. Many of the posts in this group seemed like they would be very helpful to someone trying to quit. Some of the more emotional ones were very moving and made me rethink my mild smoking habit.

The Braithwaite support group analysis identified five different types of messages coded into the support responses: information, tangible assistance, esteem support, network support, and emotional support. The most common of these was emotional support, occurring 40% of the time, with the second most common being information, at 31.3%. This initially surprised me, as I thought that an online support group would be a relatively cold environment, with people only giving factual and information based posts to help others, instead of being emotionally supportive. However, upon thinking about this more, I think that the anonymity and nature of a support group would actually foster emotional responses, as people would not feel as hindered as they may in face to face communication. The next most common types of messages are esteem support, network support, and tangible support, with 18.6%, 7.1%, and 2.7%, respectively.

When my roommate and I analyzed the coding of the messages, we had an inter-rater reliability of 81.7%. This was surprisingly close to the 80% inter-rater reliability the Braithwaite test had. Similar to the Braithwaite results, we found that the most common messages were those with emotional support, at 55%. This makes sense for a few reasons. First was that the post we mainly looked at was a very sad and moving story about woman and her father both trying to quit smoking. They quit at the same time, but the woman soon relapses and does not tell anyone. Then, later, she finds out her dad has cancer and he tells her “at least we quit in time to save you.” The obvious emotional nature of this post probably led to a lot more emotional responses than some other, more trivial groups. Also the emotionality of the responses could have to do with the CMC medium itself. With everyone anonymous, nobody feels embarrassed or ashamed of what they post, so people feel freer to write emotional responses. Surprisingly, we only found 5 (25%) posts that had any solid information in them to help one quite smoking, and also 5 posts that had esteem support. I thought there would have been more information about quitting smoking on these forums. I guess the lack of info could be attributed to the fact that antismoking information is very easy to come by, and these groups don’t really need to reiterate it. They are mainly just to support each other as they try to quit. Finally, we did not see any instances of either network support or tangible support. I would have expected this, as both of these require the poster to not remain as anonymous as they had been before. And although these are online support groups, people still don’t want to share any personal information with strangers on the internet.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.stop-smoking/browse_thread/thread/dfd94576e8f0ba07/c3a36c962f19a218?lnk=gst&q=quit#c3a36c962f19a218

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.stop-smoking/browse_thread/thread/d33cc813ea653c26/845d5f9da7d8a9b9?lnk=gst&q=quit#845d5f9da7d8a9b9

8 Inter-Rater Reliability

Group members: Gregory Stephens, Joshua Davis, Elliot Pinkus

The thread we chose is a support group on Usenet about people trying to quit smoking. It had 35 total posts, and we rated the first 20. These were our results:




We found that this assignment was really an exercise in experimental design. Although design is important to any scientific field, psychology has a special need for it because there is a delicate balance involved in having empirical evidence to support intangible theories (i.e. a reason why Freud may lose a lot of support). The inter-rater reliability for our team just barely met the requirement of 70%. An inter-rater reliability above 80% would have helped to better support our findings as the quality of our results, though statistically significant, might come into question in any criticism of our analysis. Our ratings showed that esteem and emotional support are closely tied. We found that we had a hard time distinguishing these two characteristics seeing as how we rated nine tenths of the same messages having both characteristics, or the others having neither characteristic. This somewhat subjective rating choice should have been corrected by having multiple graders, but that did not occur in our trials (possibly stemming from our ambiguity of the differences between the two). However, we discovered that, in accordance with Braithwaite, tangible and network support were the least present of all 6 characteristics. This strikes us that in such various forms of support the results seem to hold true and reinforce the findings of Braithwaite. We were surprised how well our results concurred with each other especially since we were skeptical of the inter-rater reliability between our group at the start of the assignment, but we nonetheless found the results reliable and validated them.

From our findings in this experiment, we hypothesized that Wallace's number theory does not really hold up in most online environments. Although many online spaces can create a breeding ground for flame wars and hostility between members, we believe that, depending on where you look, support can be prevalent in the online world. For example, the vast majority of the posts submitted to the Usenet group we examined were supportive and meant to be helpful to the original poster. There were, perhaps, one or two members who left inflammatory or hateful messages, but this amount is dwarfed by the number of people who truly wanted to provide help and support. This lead us to think that many people, at their core, have a fundamental desire or goal to help others, without expecting something (tangible or intangible) in return – as did the people who responded on this support group, who were all posting anonymously (i.e. with a screen name). They were providing their honest support to people they don’t even know in the real world without expecting anything in return, other than the satisfaction of helping others.

Wallace presents the case of Kitty Genovese in the chapter, an example of the number theory. We think that this behavior might exist in a very small percentage of online environments, but certainly not all, or even most of them. The number theory may hold true in some real world environments, but we don’t think this idea applies to online environments to the same extent. As for Walther's Social Distance, Anonymity, Acccess, and Impression Management: we feel that these are more in line with our findings than Wallace’s theory, though our findings are most compatible with Braithwaite’s theory. Looking at individual posts we could find instances of each of these factors. With further research, possibly Braithwaite and Walther could find similar aspects in their theories and form a more cohesive theory suitable for the online world. For now, our findings mainly support Braithwaite as his theory best fits our observations.

8: Shybies and Drugs

Josh and I analyzed a very interesting group on Google groups. It was about support for overcoming shyness. We came across some very interesting and strange posts, as well as some possibly disturbed individuals. The first group was about a guy who had a specific experience with a girl and couldn’t tell if the girl was actually interested in him. He turned to the forum to see if anyone could explain if the girl did or didn’t. The second group was about a man who wanted to use drugs to analyze his mind to figure out why he was shy or depressed. Both of these groups involved pretty strange situations which led us to believe that the responses would be mostly jokes, but it didn’t end up being as predominant as I thought.

% inter-rater reliability			0.825
			frequency	% of msgs
Information			15	0.75
Tangible assistance			2	0.1
Esteem support			8	0.4
Network support			2	0.1
Emotional support			12	0.6
Humor			4	0.2

Our results were moderately different from what is predicted by Braithwaite, but this can be expected because the small sample size.

The two groups had different tones, so they relied more heavily on different sub-categories. The responses of the first group were more emotionally oriented, because the question posed by the creator of the group was very open ended and influenced by personal experience. The second group had the creator asking people for specific advice about past experiences, so it tended elicit informational responses.

Something unique that we noticed about our two groups, was that community showed much tangible assistance. This is defined as a user going out of their way to help somebody else by producing something other than information based on past experiences or psychological support. In fact, there was only one response between both groups that we felt showed this quality. For example, in the group about which drugs to try, nobody ever offered a way for the creator to obtain or learn first-hand about these drugs, they simply offered their own opinions and experiences.

These posts exhibited all four dimensions of attraction to online social support, which include social distance, anonymity, interaction management, and access. Social distance says that it is easier to talk about awkward things over CMC. This is definitely exhibited by these groups, especially the one concerning drug use. It is much easier to talk about something illegal when you are not face to face or easily identifiable. This description also applies to anonymity. Interaction management and access describe how the users can control the flow of communication, and therefore feel more in control and prone to CMC disclosures. The asynchronicity of this medium allows users to phrase their posts carefully and express exactly what is on their mind. The distributedness allows them to distance themselves further and feel more comfortable. It is easier to share personal problems when there is no chance off anyone knowing who you are. Also, people are more comfortable giving advice without formal education in the subject when they are not liable for incorrect advice.

- My partner was Josh Sirkin, we are both on the Brown blog

Group 1

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.drugs.psychedelics/browse_thread/thread/29893d3683b9feab/c40d4635ae9d7636?hl=en&lnk=st&q=shyness#c40d4635ae9d7636

Group 2

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.drugs.psychedelics/browse_thread/thread/29893d3683b9feab/c40d4635ae9d7636?hl=en&lnk=st&q=shyness#c40d4635ae9d7636

8: Survivor Infidelity

This post was written by:
Gretchen Schroeder (Brown)
Chrissy Piemonte (Brown)
Hannah Weinerman (Purple)

In this study, we analyzed a support group for injured parties of infidelity. We came across SurvivingInfidelity.com, The original post from ToCatchACheat, was in the “Just Found Out” forum, the betrayed spouse can post their experience of discovering the infidelity and get advice about the next steps. Our poster, ToCatchACheat, suspected that her husband is cheating on her and sought advice about how to catch him as well as to gain strength from the support group.

The statistics we found of each support type are as follows:

% Inter-rater Reliability- 0.6666667
Frequency/%
Information: 18/0.9
Tangible Assistance: 0/0
Esteem Support: 14/0.7
Network Support: 2/0.1
Emotional Support: 9/0.45
Humor: 3/0.15

The most prevalent of the support types in the posts (appearing in 90% of them), was Informational, which primarily included advice, teaching from past experiences and referrals to experts or other websites. Interestingly, Esteem support appeared in 70% of the posts while Emotional support only appeared in 45% of them. We found low instances of Network support (10%) and Humor (15%) in the posts but no tangible assistance whatsoever.

These findings contrast to the results from the Braithwaite analysis on support groups for disabilities. A notable discrepancy between our results and the Braithwaite findings was while information dominated the messages in our results, it was only apparent in a third of the disability ones. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the main intention of the original message was to solicit advice from the group. The instances of emotional support (40% and 45%) and network support (7.1% and 10%) were comparatively similar in both sets of data. However, there were far more messages containing Esteem support in the cases of infidelity (70%) than the disability (only 18.6%). This may have occurred because the betrayed in the infidelity scenario genuinely need more conformation that their spouses' actions were not caused by any of their doings and probably needed more confidence boosting whereas people with disabilities understand that they are no way responsible for their present condition. Tangible assistance was no where to be found in these posts, which reflects the Braithwaite's notion that it's much harder to provide physical assistances in a CMC environment due to the social distance of the users.

Walther and Boyd's factors seem to have played a major role in the posts we read. These people were posting about very personal issues on a very distant level. Many people on the site may not even talk to their best friends about the topics they were posting about online because it is ahrd to talk about face to face. One person even commented that it had taken her a few days before she was able to actually sit down and admit to what was going on. This fits with interaction management, as well, since she is taking time to think about what she wants to say and how she wants to convey the message. Also, because this is a community for those who are being cheated on, there may be very few times when they are able to post. The blog allows them to do this. Anonymity is important because people are self-disclosing to others whom they don’t know. The last key, access, addresses the idea that these arethe people who have acces to the internet and to the thread. The only people who are going to be reading/posting on these threads (besides Comm 245 students) are those who are affected by such a topic.

8 | Hooked on Coffee

Our group studied the all too familiar problem of coffee addiction on the thread alt.coffee. The initial poster Blazing Laser disclosed that he felt physiological effects from coffee withdrawal, which his doctor was unable to explain. Despite his complaints, he concludes his post lightly,

“At least it's legal and universally available... But I never realized caffeine was such a powerful drug!”

Compared to Braithwaite’s study on disability, this poster's problem was not as serious and many more people could relate to coffee. According to Walther's dimensions of attraction to social support, Blazing Laser most likely responded to the social distance and anonymity on the support group. Blazing Laser was able to discuss his extreme coffee dependency in an environment in which he had control over the impression he conveyed to others, he could share very personal details without needing to have first developed an intimate relationship, and there was less risk of social stigma and judgment. His post received a good amount of attention from other anonymous users who had also pondered the effects of coffee on their lifestyles. After we finished coding the different types of responses found in the replies to the thread, we found that, unsurprisingly, the nature of support offered for coffee addicts was very different from the support offered for people with disabilities. In Braithwaite's study, emotional support was most prevalent, followed by information support. Tangible and network support messages were found the least frequently. Our results showed 34% messages contained informational support, 23% contained humor, 26% contained esteem, and 17% contained emotional support. We also had a decent inter-rater reliability of 74% which shows a good level of consistency between our coding.

• Inter-rater Reliability: .74

The thread we examined developed as a debate, explaining the prevalence of information support as both sides supported their arguments for and against the addictiveness of caffeine using outside sources. Many users assumed the role of teaching, by forwarding external links to the thread on the dangers of coffee. People on the same side of the argument supported each other through emotional and esteem support. Those who saw coffee as addicting disclosed personal information, writing,

“If I miss my morning cups I get a crashing headache by about lunchtime....i am good for nothing.”

This provided the original poster with forms of esteem and emotional support, illustrating that his concerns were real and that there were others experiencing similar feelings. Unlike the environment in Braithwaite's study, the relatively trivial nature of the debate opened the door for users to make wise cracks about their own hard core addictions to coffee. We observed a high degree of humor in the content and language of the posts. Messages that weren't coded as humor were mostly composed in an informal, relaxed tone. Only a few messages were written more seriously in an attempt to persuade other users to accept the veracity of the claims made about caffeine and addiction.

The flippant tone of many of the responses to Blazing Lasers would probably not be accepted on a disability forum, where many users face serious and lifelong health and identity problems. It is hard to compare such problems to the trivial issue of feeling tired and sluggish without having a daily caffeine fix. This difference may also explain why we observed such low measures of emotional support when compared to Braithwaite's study. For a less serious topic such as coffee, empathy may be a bit out of place and over the top. The only empathy observed dealt with understanding, where some users had similar, sometimes more serious, experiences as others and disclosed this information as a means as support. But in general, the atmosphere didn't call for serious support, as the topic was mostly centered around personal curiosity about the dangers of coffee; there were no tragic or life-changing situations posted.

By Sarah Mullins (Green Blog), Anthony Gonzalez (Green Blog), and Steve Spagnola

8: Can I Get Some Support?

Our group: Evan Sperling and Katie Bren (Purple)

Debate surrounds the rapid development of online communities, whose lack of physical co-location of community members has often been criticized. Are these online communities in fact encouraging empty relationships? However, recent research has shown that online communities can in fact provide the tactical, emotional, and networked support for individuals who can't find it in any other medium. Braithwaite, Waldron, and Finn (1999) illustrated this phenomenon in their study that decoded online messages in disability social support groups. Their coding scheme was based on five factors that were said to be either present or not in messages: information, tangible assistance, esteem support, network support, and emotional support.

For this assignment, we analyzed 20 messages that were posted to a Usenet group called alt.support.divorce and coded them according to the five types of support behaviors that Braithwaite considered in her study, with the addition of humor. Our results are as follows:




Our results were comparable to hers in that tangible assistance and network support were present in the fewest number of messages. In addition, we found a similar amount of emotional support (40% in her study vs. 50% in ours). Though we discerned esteem support in twice as many messages as in her study (18% vs. 35%), our observation that it was the third most frequent support behavior was in agreement with her results. The biggest difference between our analyses was that we found information in every message that we looked at. Braithwaite detected information in only 31.6% of the messages she coded.

What could account for this difference? One possibility is that discrepancies in support behavior frequency are due to the topic of the discussion group. Braithwaite's study analyzed posts on a forum for people with disabilities, whereas we chose a divorce support forum. In discussing why she found emotional support more often than the other types of support, whereas another study found information to be most common, she referenced the optimal matching model, which suggests that "emotional support is more likely to be given when the recipient is experiencing distressful circumstances that are not subject to his or her control" (Braithwaite 142). Indeed, divorces are relatively more controllable than disabilities, and this would explain why our results varied. Many of our messages focused on giving specific advice (information) regarding how to deal with divorce.

Similarly, the relative amounts of other support behaviors would likely depend on the topic at hand and/or the nature of the group, as well. For example, a forum for alcoholics might contain many references to Alcoholics Anonymous or other communities that can help someone with his or her problems and give network support. In addition, the fact that we and she both found a severe lack of tangible support might suggest that the typical online poster (most likely a stranger) does not have the ability or resources to help another person in a direct manner. Furthermore, the fair amount of esteem support that we found was mainly due to people commenting that one's significant other, rather than the one posting the problem, was the person at fault in a relationship - something that is probably typical in this type of forum. Finally, though humor was present in a few of our messages, it seemed that the severity of the issues being discussed and a desire to be truly supportive prompted most people to be serious and mindful.

The social exchanges that occurred in our group can be analyzed using Walther's four dimensions of online social support as well as Wallace's theory of numbers. Wallace notes that in FtF interaction, the presence of large numbers of people in an emergency causes individuals to diffuse the responsibility to help onto the group members surrounding them. However, she theorizes that online, the numbers of people present in that community are only one factor determining the likelihood of an individual seeking help actually receiving it. Factors (as described by Walther) that affect social support online include: social distance, anonymity, interaction management, and 24/7 access. In the instance of our analyzed group, it is evident that these factors hold true. For instance, participating members of the thread are identified solely by their screen name, making it easy to remain anonymous and share personal information about their marital status, without risking being “caught” by any of their personal acquaintances. Furthermore, if we note the timing of the posts (which is found in the upper right-hand corner) we can see that the times of responses posted vary widely, and are not immediate. Thus, individuals posting are responding whenever they see fit, 24/7. This is noted as more appealing than FtF support, which is often not well thought about because of the immediate nature required of the response.

After decoding 20 messages we also became aware that the individuals posting responses were making great use of the interaction management made available by online social support group. The Hyperpersonal model notes that CMC allows for selective self-presentation, meaning individuals only make available the parts of themselves they choose to online (i.e. physical cues can be eliminated). In the messages we analyzed, this can be seen in the fact that certain individuals chose to omit their sex, while others explicitly defined it. When a male made the initial post of suspecting his wife of cheating, responders often explicitly mentioned their gender to validate their response.

Links to the threads:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.divorce/browse_thread/thread/16aad3dbeaa13738/475ded9c55b2263d#475ded9c55b2263d
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.divorce/browse_thread/thread/24ea5608de4b0de1/3f6f29e87506f589#3f6f29e87506f589

8: I have no friends and my cat has diarrhea!

Group members:

Zeyu Zhu (zz52) - Brown

Joe Strandberg (jls289) - Brown

Emily Abramson (era38) - Yellow

For this assignment we ventured into the vast deposit of messages in Google Groups to analyze the contents of responses given by anonymous internet users. The types of posts we encountered were fairly diverse in style, but as our data will show, also highly focused on concrete information. The topics of the four threads we decided to investigate include problems with making friends online, depressed (ex)-girlfriend, lack of friends and excitement after marriage, and finally dealing with cats that have chronic diarrhea. The threads were carefully chosen to have extensive, substantial replies since so many other topics had mostly responses with only a few words or irrelevant comments/flames.

The data from the 20 messages that we analyzed are summarized below:

% inter-rater reliability	92.5
	frequency	% of msgs	Braithwaite’s results (% of msgs)
Information	19	95.0	31.3
Tangible assistance	1	5.0	2.7
Esteem support	7	35.0	18.6
Network support	1	5.0	7.1
Emotional support	5	25.0	40.0
Humor	4	2.0	N/A

Our inter-rater reliability, at 92.5%, can be considered as fairly high. We believe several factors contribute to this considerable level of agreement between all three of us. First, the topics we examined are largely direct questions asking for specific advice, thus the replies tend to be straightforward without much convoluted text. Secondly, as according to Wallace’s theory of social support over CMC, online exchanges are anonymous and lack nonverbal cues, so the responses would likely not be overly complex to difficult to analyze. Lastly, related to Walther’s dimensions of social support, the anonymity of CMC exchange increases confidence and reduces fear of humiliation, so the posters might be more direct and frank about their comments instead of writing in a roundabout or vague manner.

The presence of information in messages is quite high in our data as well, at 95% as opposed to Braithwaite’s much more moderate 31.3%. The heavy occurrence of information likely directly relates to the type of questions asked by the opening poster. Since the topics openly asked for counsel about specific situations, the replies are expected to contain a high amount of concrete information. For example, the messages for the lady inquiring about chronic diarrhea in cats all include some form of advice or situation appraisal since they are appropriate for the topic. Tangible assistance, however, is very rare in our sample much like Braithwaite’s data, with only 1 message that expressed willingness for active participation. This correlates with the prediction that online exchanges lack personal connection and physical presence, thus strangers are unlikely to offer physical help to each other over an impersonal environment.

Esteem support is the second most common type of comment in our analysis. Many replies contained sympathetic statements such as “it’s not your fault” or “you are correct about this situation, don’t worry about what he/she says.” Our data showed a higher percentage of this occurrence than Braithwaite’s results, but the differences is not as dramatic as the information category. We believe the discrepancy stem from the type of help asked, which in our cases (all except the chronic diarrhea one) were dealing with psychological issues such as depression and loneliness. Those themes often imply low self-esteem, so the replies would naturally offer plenty of esteem-boosting remarks. Network support, however, is rather low, along the lines of Braithwaite’s results. Few posters were willing to offer actual contact information or link to networks, which is curious since some threads are basically expressly the desire for a larger network of friends.

Emotional support showed up in ¼ of our messages, which is less than Braithwaite’s figures but still significant. As we stated earlier, the topics we examined tend to exhibit psychological problems rather than physical, so the responses are fairly likely to be oriented around assisting the mind – that is, emotional support. None of our topics deal with any potentially humorous situations (with the possible exception of cats’ chronic diarrhea), so humor is expectedly infrequent like Braithwaite study’s outcome, used only in a few situations to cheer up the person asking for help.

Walther’s social distance dimension is well-demonstrated by our data, as several topics talked about deeply personal problems (depression due to antisocial behavior, marriage issues, etc) that most people would be unwilling to discuss in real life with strangers. Anonymity, as mentioned earlier, is useful to elicit clear-cut responses. Interaction management correlates with our description of the types of messages such as controlled humor and information-laden replies. Lastly, the ease of access to online support helps people (like the lady who has cats with diarrhea) to seek information when a professional (e.g. veterinarian) is not readily or cheaply available.

Threads:

Making friends online

Cats' chronic episodic diarrhea

Depressed ex-girlfriend

No friends/fun after marriage

Assignment #8: Coding Social Support Online

Kristie Lee (Yellow blog) and Minji Song (Brown blog)

For this analysis, we decided to take a look at not only our overall results as compared to Braithwaite’s social support categories, but also compare the statistics of two different kinds of support groups. We examined a thread from a support group to stop smoking (alt.support.stop-smoking in Google groups) and two threads from a support group for those who have arthritis (alt.support.arthritis). The former group an example of pro-active lifestyle change, the latter an example of debilitating lifestyle change. The following are links to each of the threads:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.stop-smoking/browse_thread/
thread/2dc2c7cca1c09f71/82629203c95420aa#82629203c95420aa

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.arthritis/browse_thread/
thread/e836d19e7d8bac13/74c0647c2082a7d9?lnk=raot#74c0647c2082a7d9

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.arthritis/browse_thread/
thread/e4e580a018e196e2/075586b2c045ce80?lnk=raot#075586b2c045ce80

Braithwaite’s study on social support communication yielded the establishment of a coding system based on Cutrona and Suhr’s five-category system (information support, tangible assistance, esteem support, network support, and emotional support). We used this coding system to analyze 20 messages posted on our chosen support groups (11 from the smoking group, 9 from the arthritis group). The following chart tables our overall results:













note: Braithwaite's results: .313, .027, .186, .071, .4

Our results were significantly different than those of Braithwaite's experiment. However, subsequent to further analysis, we discovered data that was helpful in speculating the causes of these differences. The following charts map the smoking and arthritis support threads separately:





There are three statistically significant differences between the data of the two support groups; the following elaborates our speculations as to the causes of these differences:

• Information
• Because the process of quitting smoking is “self-inflicted” and arduous, many of the group members (who are veteran quitters) feel more inclined to provide the advice-seeker with information/advice and tools to help them along their journey.
• Esteem
• Since arthritis is a condition that just happens (i.e. it’s not something you would actively pursue, and generally not in your control), advice seekers might feel the need to feel more validation from their peers that receiving this condition is in no way their fault.
• Network
• There is highly significant difference in this aspect. We speculate that it is because quitting smoking requires much more peer involvement and group support. Pressure from more people to quit will result in feelings of not wanting to let those people down.

Further speculation on an interesting factor of comparison concerns the type of support group thread that was coded. Braithwaite's experiment centered on disability social support groups. Smoking, though a concern of human health, is a factor explicitly controlled by the individual. However, arthritis and similarly disabilities, are factors that are generally out of the individual's control. This may explain the more significant frequency of esteem (validation and relief of blame) in the arthritis support groups and the disability support groups analyzed in Braithwaite's experiment.

The four dimensions of attraction to online social support that are elaborated in Walther and Boyd (2003), social distance, anonymity, interaction management and access, evidently play a role in the effectiveness and attractiveness of the online support groups that were analyzed. The very open access to support online was indicated by advice-givers numerous times, and openly admitted to the helpfulness of it in coping with these issues. Interaction management also played a significant role. Advice-seekers and advice givers would elaborate or clarify if what he/she said was not clear on their initial post, or thank advice-givers for their support by posting multiple times on a thread in different times. This indicates advice-seekers' and givers' desire to manage their impression on other people in the support group.

8 Narcoleptic Loneliness

See Dina Halajian - Green blog.

8: Dating a Divorcee - Social Support Online

Group Members:

Amber Saylor (Brown Blog) and Maren MacIntyre (Blue Blog)

Social support in online spaces, such as the remnants of Usenet groups, now encompassed by Google Groups, provides us with another fascinating interaction that has managed to move from FtF to CMC. Braithwaite uses Albrecht and Adelman's definition of this psycho-social process "social support refers to verbal and nonverbal communication between recipients and providers that reduces uncertainty about the situation, the self, the other, or the relationship, and functions to enhance a perception of personal control in one's experience" (p. 123-124) My partner and I looked at a thread under alt.support.divorce, specifically at a post requesting advice regarding trust issues involved with dating a divorced man.

(http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.divorce/browse_thread/thread/847c0440f260a870/4fa782fb8d240173?q=advice&lnk=ol&)

Our results for the 20 support messages we coded, are summarized in the table below:

Inter-rater reliability			0.9583333
			Frequency	% of msgs
Information			19	0.95
Tangible assistance			0	0
Esteem support			12	0.6
Network support			0	0
Emotional support			5	0.25
Humor			3	0.15

Overall, we have a very high inter-rater reliability, and we think this stems from the topic we analyzed, which produced social support that was fairly interesting but also sort of predictable. Since the person who started the thread asked specifically for advice about her problems, it seemed pretty clear that most responses would have some sort of informational support, which was the case. It was suggested in the Braithwaite paper that there would be more emotional and informational support found online than any other type of support. While this was clearly the case for informational support, in the messages we analyzed, there did not seem to be very much emotional support. Even though my partner disagreed on one or two instances of emotional support, once we formed a consensus, there still was not a large amount of emotional support present in our thread. Tangible and network support were the least frequently offered types of social support in the messages studied in Braithwaite et al and in those we analyzed. We are interested to see if these ratios change depending on the type of topic that people are seeking advice about or support for.

One thing that could have changed the results of our study is that we filtered through the messages and chose which ones to analyze instead of doing the first 20 after the initial post. The reason for this is because it seemed there were a lot of responses to other peoples' posts instead of responses directed toward the person asking for advice, so they did not provide any support to the original poster. Whether or not it would have made a difference in our inter-reliability rating is debatable, but we think it's very possible that there would have been an increase in emotional support, and possibly a decrease in the categories we found more of (information, esteem). Another possible explanation for low levels of emotional support was that many people seemed to get caught up in analyzing or relating to the emotions or thoughts of the poster’s divorced boyfriend. Since most people were so focused on helping her understand her boyfriend, they didn’t direct much emotional support toward the poster.

The most interesting finding that differed from the Braithwaite et al. paper is the amount of esteem support in the thread. We think this coincides with information support being high (people who gave advice also tended to validate the original poster's thought, especially through examples of their own). This also demonstrates the notion seen in several theories we have studied that people tend to self-disclose more information in an ‘anonymous’ online environment than in person.

8.1: Coding Social Support Messages

Group Members:
Anneliese Schrotenboer- Brown Blog
Ashley Downs- Yellow Blog
Jillian Moskovitz -Red Blog

For our blog assignment our group analyzed twenty different messages relating to fitness, health and weight loss. We coded the messages and sought to narrow in on features of the message that Braithwaite also looks at: information, network support, tangible assistance, esteem support, emotional support and humor. The following chart displays our results:

Inter-rater reliability 0.8416667

type of support: frequency/ %of messages

Information: 13 /0.65
Tangiable assistance: 6/ 0.3
Esteem Support: 7 /0.35
Network support: 12/ 0.6
Emotional support: 5/ 0.25
Humor: 9 /0.45

First off, our group produced an inter-related reliability of .84 which means that our results are reliable, because the majority of the message coding was agreed upon between group members. Like Braithwaite found in his studies when investigating social support in CMC there was more messages sharing information in able-bodied persons. In our messages there was no indication that any of these people had a physical disability and so the high amount of information that was shared in the messages makes sense. Like the reasoning Braithwaite provides, these people are more in control (versus a disabled person) and the information will actually be able to be put into practice.

Overall, we did not find very much emotional support but the few times it was present it was in the form of encouragement. This makes sense because in regards to fitness and heath/ weight loss topics people often need encouragement to keep on the right track and to stay focused on their goals. We felt that the reason there was little emotional support was because a lot of the postings were strictly questions and answers that were looking for facts. There were not many personal testimonies that would otherwise produce sympathy or affection.

A unique difference that existed in the results of our exercise versus Braithwaite’s study was that we had a fairly high amount of network support shown in our messages. There were many referrals to other professionals that could be of assistance, or sometimes there was the connecting of social networks. For example one individual said “here is the email address of my friend who is a trainer, I’m sure he could set you up on a weight training program.” Our prediction for the high number of network support laden messages is that because weight loss and physical fitness are very personal and individualized topics , perhaps learning and connecting with similar others is a helpful way to reach success.

Like discussed in Braithwaite’s paper we noticed a number of messages that had various types of support in them. The two types of support that were most often linked were informational and network support. Usually a contributor would offer information about an aspect of health or fitness and then towards the end of the message would follow up with a way for an individual to expand their network by connecting with someone else who could provide relevant information.

Walther and Boyd discuss that there are certain aspects of online social support that individuals find attractive and we feel that anonymity and access are the two most relevant ones in our exercise. Because weight and health issues can be very personal anonymity could increase the degree to which people feel comfortable disusing sensitive issues (diets, obesity, and poor exercising habits). The notion of constnt access to advice with these issues is also important because many people do not have time to see a nutritionist or work with a trainer during a standard work day. So the ability to connect to advice and help at convenient times is a benefit.

Below are the links to the threads our messages are from:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.diet/browse_thread/thread/5d639a3354e742e0/cd8969cac60ed9d7?lnk=st&q=weight+loss+advice#cd8969cac60ed9d7

http://groups.google.com/group/misc.fitness.misc/browse_thread/thread/2bc9bfb43992cf95/f8f842df9f6fc021?lnk=st&q=weight+loss+advice#f8f842df9f6fc021

http://groups.google.com/group/misc.fitness.weights/browse_thread/thread/d34701df5be8d183/26d7e2b8e3d97b9f?lnk=st&q=weight+loss+advice#26d7e2b8e3d97b9f

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.food.cooking/browse_thread/thread/45440534d5811f7e/25dd8f3808e74fbb?lnk=st&q=weight+loss+advice#25dd8f3808e74fbb

http://groups.google.com/group/misc.fitness.aerobic/browse_thread/thread/c299e62613bae90b/9b79472bfafeee79?lnk=st&q=weight+loss+advice#9b79472bfafeee79

Assignment 7

It's a typical experience of growing up. Your tight-knit circle of friends from high school graduate and head off to different colleges, different jobs, and different lives. Beyond brief periods of homecoming during breaks and summer vacation, the proximity that held together so firmly the social network that served so well during your adolescence is gone. The network of strong ties, frequent interaction, and shared resources is disolved into a weaker network of varied experiences, views, and skills with dispersed periods of interaction.
In my high school days, I had a core network of friends-- maybe 15 or so-- that interacted in class and outside of school. We studied together, ate together, and partied together. Our frequent interaction led to a plethora of inside jokes to tell and exciting stories to relive creating a shared historical identity. Many of us were the top achievers in the class, holding similar commitments to hardwork and success. While, we all weren't the best of friends, being within the social circle created additional contacts between otherwise seperate actors, reinforcing the ties that held together our web.
However, after highschool that all changed. Most of us went off to different colleges in different cities. There were no more friday night bowling events, common tests to study for, or gossip to catch up on. Yet, despite the loss of proximity, the ties that held us together were not shattered, rather they were merely strained. Our interactions, moved into a more mediated realm. We had always interacted together via phones and online via AIM, and we continued this means of communication to stay in touch. In fact, what had been secondary means of interaction, had become the primary resource for contact. Phone conversations and AIM chats were a way for us to keep up with what was going on in eachother lives. There were little more new events upon which to build our historical identity, but sharing in eachothers' seperate stories hearing what we were each upto in our new cities, colleges, and jobs served as a means to continue reciprocal interactions. Facebook is an especially useful tool for this means, as we can view photos of eachothers, leaves comments, and send messages. Further, our historical identity still existed, and we could always reminisce about times past.
While our web of relationships is weaker for the lack of proximity, there has been growth, as well. The friendships that were held more loosely in high school, have generally backtracked into acquaintances without the reinforcement of crisscross relationships to continue to hold them together. But, for some, stronger connections were made. For instance, myself and the ex-girlfriend of one of my good friends both ended up in Ithaca. While we interacted marginally in high school within our social network, in college we became frequent confidants and party-goers. In the end, while we have moved away from home and eachother, we maintain our social network by having moved it online.