8: Coding Social Support

Jacob Chase: Green
Emily Docktor: Green
Dana Klion: Yellow
Lauren Kramer: Blue

http://plainjanemom.com/2007/10/09/i-didnt-sign-up-for-this- particular-new-attitude/#comments

Our group analyzed a support group focused on the woes of a mother, Erika, who is fed up with her 3-year-old son’s foul attitude. Plain Jane Mom is an online community of mothers and fathers who share a great deal of common interests and experiences as parents. Users can submit default profile photos, and a short description of the user’s family often appears next to that user’s photo. User profiles may also include more detailed family descriptions and contact information. The attributes of openness and common ground seems to make Plain Jane Mom a very successful community for those who participate in it.

The first 20 messages in response to Erika’s original post were coded. The most frequent type of supportive behavior found on this particular support group was information support (coding frequency: 15). Information support was followed by humor (coding frequency: 13), then emotional support (coding frequency: 6), and then esteem support (coding frequency: 3). Our inter-coder scores for the supportive behaviors of tangible assistance and emotional support resulted in final frequencies of 0 once discrepancies were resolved. Our group agreed on a substantial majority of the presence (or lack there of) of each social support category. Inter-rater reliability was 67.5%.

Braithwaite found that emotional support messages were most frequently enacted, with 40% of the total number of support messages showing this characteristic. Informational support messages were second most frequent, being found in 31.7% of the messages Braithwaite examined. This is quite different from our statistics, which found informational support in 75% of the messages on Plain Jane Mom. Esteem support frequency came in third, as it was found evident in 18.6% of Braithwaite’s study. This is similar to our findings of 15% frequency of esteem support. In Braithwaite, network support had a frequency of 7.1% and tangible assistance accounted for 2.7% of messages. Our group research reiterates that these two categories are of lower frequencies.

In conclusion, our findings were rather similar to Braithwaite’s analyses, even though Braithwaite’s study was much more thorough. Braithwaite studied almost 1,500 messages, but we only looked at 20. His inter-rater reliability was 80%, whereas ours was a bit lower at 67.5%. This could be a result of our sample size, or perhaps due to a lack of formal code training.