“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
“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
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