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.