8. Assigning Blame with Online Support

This past weekend I was out of town and didn’t have the opportunity to work with a group here in 245, so I took the opportunity to teach my friend Juan (a Psychology major from Potsdam) about the Psychology of Social Computing.

We decided to look at a GoogleGroup for marriage support and focused on a thread titled “His and Her Stuff”, which was started by ‘Phil’ who was looking for advice about how to deal with his wife’s pack rat tendencies: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.marriage/browse_thread/thread/ca0761ec7c6e9545/f950b6957836dd4d#f950b6957836dd4d

Using the coding system established by Braithwaite and Waldron we coded 20 separate messages from unique authors on information, tangible assistance, esteem support, network support, emotional support, and humor. We had an inter-rater reliability of 0.96 and our findings are summarized in the table below.

We found that information was the most prevalent form of support found in this thread, with it being present in 100% of the messages that we analyzed. Esteem support was the second most common with 35% of the messages, followed by emotional support (15%) and humor (15%). None of the messages that we coded contained any tangible assistance or network support.

These results are somewhat in contrast to the findings of Braithwaite and Waldron’s research from 1999. In their study they found that emotional support was most prevalent online (40%), followed by information (31.3%), and then esteem support (18.6%). However, like the previous study tangible assistance and network system were not very prevalent in the online support messages.

One reason for this difference may simply be the content of the actual messages. Braithwaite and Waldron focused on support groups for individuals with disabilities, a highly personal and emotional issue. On the other hand, we looked at an issue in which someone would be considered right or wrong; which easily leant itself for individuals to weigh in and give their own input and advice, which would be coded as informational support. Additionally, Phil, the original poster of the thread, did not seem very distraught by the issue at hand and even concluded his post by saying he was “venting”, sending a message to those who responded that he was probably looking more for advice than emotional support.

One other interesting trend that we noticed while reading this thread was that there seemed to be somewhat of a “reverse esteem support”. Messages seemed to validate Phil’s wife’s position or validate her actions rather than Phil’s. This was also coded as advice and helped lead to the high information score, but we would argue that there is something more to it than simply information. However, it does not neatly fit into the category of “esteem support” because it is not Phil who is being validated. Furthermore, it does not fit into “emotional support” because again, the understanding being expressed is not for Phil, but his wife. While construed as advice, because the message had more charged language in the forms of validations it’s important to look and see if there may be another dimension to online support messages that is not present in Braithwaite and Waldron’s article.