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.