Braithwaite's article titled "Communication of Social Support in Computer-Mediated Groups for People With Disabilities" provides an overview of Cutrona and Suhr's social support category system for analyzing support group messages, and her own study's results. She describes the different elements of a message to be categorized as information, tangible assistance, esteem support, network support, and emotional support. For our assignment we rated on one extra category, humor.
We picked a group for people living with, and fighting against any type of cancer. The specific thread we analyzed was titled "Roll Call for October" where people who frequent the board give updates and support about their treatment, feelings, and lives. It can be found here. Our results after coding are presented in the following table.
We coded the first twenty messages or so (we skipped a few that had little more than a word or two). We found that we had a high inter-rater reliability score of over 94%. The areas we sometimes disagreed on were in emotional support as Braithwaite predicted, saying "coders found the definition of this category to be too broad."
Braithwaite found 31% of messages to include information, 13% to include tangible assistance, 19 to include esteem support, 7% to include network support, and 40% to include emotional support. Our results were generally consistent in the categories of tangible assistance and network support, our coding yielded 25% and 5%, respectively.
One area where our findings were drastically different than presented in the study was in information. We found information twice as frequently as in the Braithwaite paper. We believe the nature of the individual thread was the reason for finding information so frequently. Many posts first gave information in the form of updates, treatments, and medical test numbers, and then replied to previous posts. This was also probably aided by the Social Identity Deindividuation Theory; the idea that when social identity is salient and members are anonymous there is greater social identification, conformity, influence, attraction, and polarization. Since the first poster structured her post with information first, followed by words of encouragement, many other members who identified with the anonymous poster structured their posts similarly.
Another aspect of our findings that differed with the study was in esteem support. Again our findings were more than twice as frequent. Compliments about others' drive, attitude, and perseverance were common, as were posts that validated the others' concerns and beliefs. Such compliments and validation we found could be attributed to Walther's Hyperpersonal Theory. Users selectively self presented information and could have appeared more positive, or reported numbers that made them feel better, yielding validation and compliments. The repliers could have used the over-attribution process, to take what the poster said and generalize it to all aspects of their lives.
The last metric that differed with the study was in emotional support. Like the previous results, it was again more than twice as frequent, a whopping 86%. Nearly all messages had a form of emotional support, usually sympathy, understanding, empathy, encouragement, and prayer. SIDE theory was probably the motivating factor in this. There seemed to be a great group salience, the members had a lot in common, and even spoke of hobbies they had in common (visiting lighthouses). They could have felt a lot in common also from the over-attribution process, and selective self presentation, making their posts very encouraging, heartfelt, and sympathetic.
In general the board seemed like a place to come for both esteem and emotional support. Most users seemed to have aggressive forms of cancer and felt comfortable talking about their situation in this anonymous, high group salient, environment. In fact, we also rated the posts on humor content, many were tongue-in-cheek about their treatments and side-effects, bringing a lightness to a serious matter, making everyone feel more like a part of a group and more comfortable.
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