Entry by: Ariel Tassy and Peter Thompson
Table and example links at the bottomAfter coding our 20 different Support Network messages, we entered our data into the spreadsheet and looked at the frequency and percent of messages for each category. The category that appeared the most was information. Many of the messages we read had some sort of advice or facts that the writer was trying to get across to the original person who posted the message seeking help. This was the most common type of post. Next was esteem support, but only having about half of the percentage that information had. Many of the posts also included people trying to validate the person seeking help’s feelings and reactions. Comments like these were often used, “Your right to feel that way, I understand where your coming from”. The next most used category was network support. After that was humor. It was interesting to see how much humor was actually used to make the person seeking help feel better. Many of the messages that did contain humor used sarcasm. Last was tangible support with zero messages. Our inter-rater reliability had a value of 0.73.
Our findings differed somewhat from what Braithwaite found. In the Braithwaite article the category that came up the most often was emotional support. After that was information support, esteem support, network support, and then tangible assistance. We found much less emotional support than did Braithwaite. However like Braithwaite, we did find the network and tangible support being used less frequently then the others. Another interesting part of the Braithwaite article was the Humor section. Similarly to us, Braithwaite found that many messages included sarcastic humor. He also says that the messages that did include humor were sometimes confused and hard to interpret. This is something we definitely discovered while coding the messages. Messages that included some type of ironic or sarcastic humor were the hardest to code and interpret. Maybe the fact that we stumbled upon quite a few humorous messages affected our results because we confused the message and could not correctly code it. Another reason why our results could be different is because although the guidelines for each category is laid out in the article, it was often difficult to sometimes decide exactly what type of support was occurring, and this not only caused a lower inter-reliability but also could be why our results somewhat different from Braithwaite’s’.
When comparing our results with other theories and points brought up in class it is very interesting to see where our findings came into conflict with the results. What we found neither confirmed or negated the four dimensions of attraction to online social support that are brought up by Walther & Boyd (2003). It was actually very interesting to see that none of the dimensions held up on a consistent basis, some even countered others just by the nature of them.
The first dimension, social distance, is that people appreciate the distance of the internet that allows a greater audience and in turn a greater expertise. This was clear in most of the interactions. However, in one talking about ADHD/OCD/TS in their kids, two women were complaining that the large scope was making it hard to find people who know about the
The next dimension of anonymity was the most consistent. People generally would not post information relating to their true, not online, identity or contact information. Occasionally an email would be put up, or a potentially real sounding name, but there were no guarantees that those posts were those people.
Interaction management is the ability that users appreciate, to carefully construct and craft their messages. Some people would clearly have well written explanations, but because of anonymity, some people would clearly not think through their responses, we will cite numerous typos in the shortest, most aggressive or emotional responses as evidence.
The last dimension called access was clearly the one solid piece that people stood by. There would be entries from all times of day, even responses to comments from months prior.
One more idea we will relate to is what Wallace brought up in her book. The idea is that people in “real life” are less likely to help someone in need when there are more people around. There is a diffusion of responsibility. Online however, it appears that the decreased “noticeability” and lack of non-verbal cues from other people make someone more willing to help out another in need. This was clear just be the threads we found always had a bunch of responses with many opinions showing that people did make an effort to help, even if they didn’t do much or made it worse.
Table:
| | % inter-rater reliability | 0.733333 |
| | Frequency | % of messages |
| Information | 16 | 0.8 |
| Tangible assistance | 0 | 0 |
| Esteem support | 9 | 0.45 |
| Network support | 1 | 0.05 |
| Emotional support | 6 | 0.3 |
| Humor | 2 | 0.1 |
the first 10 responses in this link
the responses from spartacus and agaw.buhay and omprakash1 in this link
The sparticus response in this link
The XcitableOne and nKnisley responses in this link
The morph grrl response in this link
The Sue H, Jane Pall and ATeased 5941 response in this link
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