8 Maladjusted People With Internet Connections

Spencer Dorcik (Red)
Eden Mayle (Red)
Emily Wellikoff (Brown)

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.shyness/browse_thread/thread/62f1a7bdadc4ecd1/d47a91b5a32dce7a?lnk=gst&q=dating+advice+phy#d47a91b5a32dce7a

Our group selected a dating support group found within Google Groups for our examination of support messages. The starting thread was asking, amusingly enough, why a man’s mother’s advice on dating and women seems to be “misleading” and why this seemed to be the case a lot of the time. The support the original poster received ranged from supportive and informative to self-centered and incredibly sexist and derogatory towards women. After analyzing the first 20 responses to the original post, we plugged in our coding decisions and ended up with some interesting and relevant data. Out of the 20 messages, 11 (55%) were coded for informational support while only 4 each (20%) were coded for emotional support and humor. None of the other support modalities received any consensus coding. Our inter-rater reliability was 66%. One of the intriguing aspects of our end statistics was that only 3 messages were coded for more than one characteristic. Most messages only offered information, or only emotional support, or only humor, or nothing at all.

These results compliment the findings of Braithwaite and Waldron (1999), who coded messages in an online support group for the disabled. The largest percentage of their messages consisted of informational and emotional support, while network support and tangible assistance were encountered least frequently. Our results closely mirror these findings, though information was much more prevalent than emotional support in our message corpus. In this respect, our results are more consistent with those of Cutrona and Suhr (1992), who also found informational support most frequently. The similarity of our findings may stem from our examination of a relatively non-emotional group of messages, much like the messages studied by Cutrona and Suhr. In addition, we found support for the optimal matching model which predicts that less emotional support will be found in contexts in which the message recipients can control their situation. On a dating message board, many users are seeking information in the hopes of improving their circumstances, while users in a disability support group might be more inclined to seek sympathy about a situation they cannot change. We also found humor to be as frequent as emotional support in our messages. Some users offered self-deprecating comments, perhaps to convey empathy, while others demonstrated a more lighthearted sense of humor. It seems that humor plays a large role in maintaining the supportive atmosphere found in these online communities. Finally, our inter-rater reliability (66%) fell below the inter-rater reliability demonstrated by Braithwaite and Waldron (80%). This could be because we received less training in identifying details that indicate the presence of various forms of support.

Our results showing that social support within this group was predominantly concerned with relaying informational and, less frequently, emotional support can be rationalized with Walther’s dimensions of support. These dimensions include social distance, anonymity, interaction management, and access. For instance, the Internet provides a distance that allows for people to feel disconnected from others and less vulnerable to judgment, resulting in emotional support that often involves personal disclosure. Also, this distance provides for a much larger audience than face to face interactions. If you tell a friend a problem, you will just get social support from that friend, whereas if you post that problem online, you can get informational support from many people, even including experts. Additionally, the Internet allows for anonymity which again increases personal divulgence in the form of emotional support, and increases confidence to provide informational support. Moreover, the Internet allows for interaction management, meaning people can construct messages carefully and with more time, resulting in support that is both informative and sympathetic. Finally, the Internet gives those seeking social support, access that is simply unavailable from other media; thus, information is literally at a person’s fingertips whenever they need it. Walther’s dimensions of attraction are integral to understanding why online social support is mainly informational and emotional.