8.0: "Bipolar disorder is causing my divorce"

Hello Green bloggers (and non-Greens here for the first time). I have decided to do this blog alone, for I could not find a partner in time for the post.

I decided to analyze and code a forum/thread for Bipolar Disorder (since Braithwaite, Waldron & Finn focused on people with disabilities). Bipolar disorder can affect many people's lives in many different ways. This includes some of the things Braithwaite et al. emphasized: self-care, communication, and socialization.

I used the coding system by Braithwaite et al. and coded 20 reply posts on a thread from different people experiencing the disease or with the disease. I coded whether the replies contained information, tangible assistance, esteem support, network support, emotional support, and humor. I had a low inter-rater reliability of 0.46 and my table is pasted below (sorry about the size).

Information, esteem support, and emotional support were the most common form of support on the thread. The made up 70%, 65%, and 80% (respectively) of the responses. This data goes along with Braithwait et al. and their research. They said that emotional support was most common online, then information, and then esteem support. The data presented in the table supports their findings.

The reason the data may be leaning towards these three types of support is because of the nature of the thread. It began with a wife/mother telling a story about how her husband with BPD is driving them to divorce. Many of the replies to her post came from individuals suffering the same thing. They gave her advice telling her what to do to help (information), they empathized with her situation (emotional support), and gave her compliments about how she is a strong woman for dealing with her husband (esteem). There was little to no humor (rightfully so) because the nature of this woman's post was not a laughing matter.

Some other posts on the thread were other people sharing their stories as well. These stories scored a zero in all the support catagories, for it was just a person reaching out for help or describing their situation, and not giving advice to others.

An interesting thing that I noticed while reading the thread was that there was one prominent poster named "Anna". She is a woman with BPD and posted many times to give advice to and support people struggling directly or indirectly with the disease. Many of the people in the thread looked to her for guidance and used her as their main source of support.