8 Anxiety Analyses

This study was conducted in conjunction with Lindsay Bass of the yellow blog.

Our group decided to analyze the messages of an anxiety and panic disorder support group on Google Groups. (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.anxiety-panic/topics) We coded each of the twenty messages into the excel spreadsheet, and determined which category of support it fell into.

Braithwaite distinguished six different types of support commonly found on social support websites.

The first category, informational support, is made up of advice, referrals to experts, situational appraisal, and teaching.

The second category, tangible assistance, is made up of loans, performance of a directed and indirect task, active participation, and expressing willingness.

The third category, esteem support, includes compliments, validation, and relief of blame. The fourth category, network support, is made up of access and presence of companions.

The fifth category, emotional support, is made up of, physical affection, confidentiality, sympathy, understanding, empathy, encouragement, and prayer.

The final category, humor, simply refers to the presence of humor in the message.

After completing the spreadsheet, we compared our results to Braithwaite’s study. We found a far higher incidence of informational messages at 75% than Braithwaite did at 31.3%. We had literally no tangible assistance or network support messages in any of the support messages we analyzed. We also found an esteem support of 45%, far greater than that of Braithwaite’s content analyses at 18.6%. This is due to the nature of the support group we chose. As anxiety disorders are mental conditions, it is very difficult to offer tangible assistance to other sufferers. However, esteem support is especially meaningful to these individuals, who are seeking validation from one another online. This explains our increased incidence of esteem support messages relative to Braithwaite’s analyses.

Analyzing the social support messages about anxiety affirmed Walther’s theory about online social support. Walther argued that because of social distance and anonymity, more people would respond and provide support. These factors were especially relevant since the threads we studied contained posts from socially anxious individuals. They may not have had the courage to ask for support face to face, but online they can carefully construct messages and avoid social scrutiny because of removal of gating features. Anonymity especially worked to their advantage. Since the online network is much larger than the network of each individual’s surrounding company, social distance provided greater access to information and a wider variety of opinions. By hearing people’s experiences with anxiety all over the U.S., respondents are able to gain perspective and receive objective advice that they may not seek from members of their local community. Although Wallace argued that online social support would be less helpful because of diffusion of responsibility, our study supported Walther’s counter-claim that anonymity and social distance would increase the utility of online social support sites.

Our percent inter-rater reliability was .89. This is over the benchmark value of 70%, and represents a significant level of reliability.

% inter-rater reliability			0.8916667
			frequency	% of msgs
Information			15	0.75
Tangible assistance			0	0
Esteem support			9	0.45
Network support			0	0
Emotional support			6	0.3
Humor			5	0.25