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