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Post by drdave on Nov 15, 2016 9:18:35 GMT -5
It seems to be a common phenomenon. If you sort the members of this forum by ascending no of posts, you get to page 57 of 93 before there is a single post! Perhaps people feel that by increasing the registered membership, they show support for the forum even if they feel they don't need to contribute.
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Post by resistor on Nov 15, 2016 9:25:34 GMT -5
It seems to be a common phenomenon. If you sort the members of this forum by ascending no of posts, you get to page 57 of 93 before there is a single post! Perhaps people feel that by increasing the registered membership, they show support for the forum even if they feel they don't need to contribute. I've often wondered why there were so many people that registered without posting...
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Post by wascalwywabbit on Nov 15, 2016 9:39:00 GMT -5
Some may sign up, forget (something), then sign up again... or simply feel they have nothing to contribute after further investigation. Or life moves them along and thus we are a thing forgotten to them, I.e. they get too busy or such. Not that amount of speech in a public forum positively correlates with -meaningful- contribution... If that WERE the case 'politician' would be a more honorable profession.
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Post by grävling on Nov 15, 2016 18:29:02 GMT -5
I believe that some people, at any rate, think that you have to make an account even to read things. There are fora where this is true, and maybe they are used to that.
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Post by drdave on Nov 16, 2016 9:42:29 GMT -5
I believe that some people, at any rate, think that you have to make an account even to read things. There are fora where this is true, and maybe they are used to that. Too few people pluralise forum correctly +1
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Post by ntsheep on Nov 16, 2016 10:20:37 GMT -5
I believe that some people, at any rate, think that you have to make an account even to read things. There are fora where this is true, and maybe they are used to that. Too few people pluralise forum correctly +1 Not all of us have a doctorate Some of us are just lowly little bits of highly advanced computer code designed to mimic a sheep that jumps back and forth from a human body to the digital realms of the web
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Post by grävling on Nov 21, 2016 5:08:19 GMT -5
tenbsmith: Probably too late for your paper, but it occurred to me that you might want to talk about the level of engagement of the people in your online community, and that those who post are 'more engaged'. Even if just to provice variety in how you refer to certain groups of people.
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Post by tenbsmith on Nov 21, 2016 10:57:52 GMT -5
Good point grävling and not too late--this paper is on pause for now, awaiting additional data from a collaborator. Early in the development of the paper, the statistician developed two scores: 1) a "Read" score reflecting how often user read different parts of the site. 2) An "Engage" score reflecting how often users posted or created content on the site. I didn't like calling the second one an 'Engage' score, because reading is a form of engagement. Which is what led to this thread. In the paper, i plan to talk about how different levels of engagement lead to different levels of Social Support from the site. Reading increases perceived social support to some degree. OTOH, Contributing is a more powerful predictor of percieved social support. For historical purposes, I'll note that I believe this thread inspired Lurker to change his user name to @contributor. This could be important information for historians centuries from now trying to understand whn you have to type "@ lurker" in order to tag contributor-- contributor . :-)
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Post by grävling on Nov 21, 2016 12:09:18 GMT -5
Ah, so completely inadvertantly I ended up turning the flashlight on where you have the problem. I do think, like you that reading is a form of engagement.
My experience with on-line communities is that, at the start, people join because they want to find something out, or report a problem. If they find out what they want to know by reading, then they often go away quite satisfied with this. Other people, on the other hand, move to wanting to be helpful. Or amusing. Or show off something cool they have done or discovered. At any rate, while I can see that 'do you post' is a pretty good indicator for 'do you think that the site provides a decent level of social support' it is in large part because the posters want to _give_ social support, and posting is something that they can do.
Turns out that on a different site I know, setting up a 'shared recipes for people with PolyCystic Kidney Disease' section enabled a lot of people who badly wanted to be helpful do something. Medical advice they generally wanted to leave to those in the relevant professions, but food that fits a pretty restrictive diet and still tastes good was something they could help with.
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Post by tenbsmith on Nov 21, 2016 12:30:44 GMT -5
Your post parallels other aspects of the paper. We use 'use' variables Read/Contribute as predictors of perceived social support (PSS), based on the idea that the more you use the site, the more support you'll get, which is a pretty straight forward hypothesis. Worth documenting.
We have a separate line of investigation that uses people's reported reasons for using the site to social support. People answer a series of questions describing the degree to which they use the site to 1) Get Information, 2) Get Emotional Support, 3) Give Info/Emo Support, or 4) Compare themselves to other survivors. We derive scores for each of these reasons for use from their answers. The first three of these--Get Info, Get Emo, Give Support--are very strong predictors of PSS; stronger than Read or Contribute scores. To some degree, this suggests that people's reasons for using the site have more to do with how much social support they perceive than their actual use. However, this may also reflect the limitations of our sample which is mostly long-term users, many of whom have not actively posted lately.
Fun. :-)
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Post by grävling on Nov 21, 2016 14:41:05 GMT -5
One other thing to consider -- when I was an undergraduate our sociology professor wanted to study how humans fall in love. His thesis, amply proven by the results, was that different people meant very different things by 'I love you' and had radically different expectations on what they could expect in the way of behaviour from those who claimed to love them. Turns out that there were clusters of beliefs that went hand-in-hand. For instance, the people who thought that love wasn't real unless it was also jealous had disasterous results when embarking on relationships with those who thought that jealousy was a nasty bundle of dependence, anxiety and lack of self-esteem. Things would work out better, he thought, if we could understand the breadth of human experience that has been called 'love' by humans over the ages. (And leaving out the sort of love you have for your children, your parents, your country and your favourite sports team, which were out of the scope of the studies.)
He made a questionaire, and found a pretty strong co-relation between people who were describing themselves as 'quite lonely' and those who described their childhoods as 'quite unhappy'. The interesting thing was that over the course of a few years most of these people ended up falling in love, which popped them right into the territory he wanted to study. Out came the questionaire again. Unsurprisingly, these people were not describing themselves as 'quite lonley' right now. But they weren't describing their childhoods as quite unhappy, either.
This seems a fairly frustrating result for those sociologists who want to study unhappy childhoods.
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Post by tenbsmith on Nov 21, 2016 14:55:12 GMT -5
ha ha, frustrating for sociologists who want to study unhappy childhoods--perhaps they should study perceptions of unhappy childhoods. :-)
Those findings are consistent with psychologists' work showing memories are highly plastic, changing overtime due to a host of factors.
My study may suffer from some Recall Bias, but overall i'm fairly confident the results we are getting reflect reality.
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Post by grävling on Nov 22, 2016 2:39:46 GMT -5
Do you have any way to test whether any given responder is an extrovert or an introvert? I posit that people who find face-to-face contact with groups of people emotionally draining would prefder to get support from on-line communities. But does the research support this idea?
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Post by tenbsmith on Nov 22, 2016 10:07:46 GMT -5
That's an interesting question, but we don't have a measure of introversion/extroversion. I'm not aware of research in this area. but there may be, since online community research is a side project, my major focus is quality of life of cancer patients/survivors. I like your hypothesis that people who find face-to-face contact with groups emotionally draining prefer support from on-line communities, though that may be related to but a bit different than extroversion/introversion.
We do have some related data though. Similar to your hypothesis, we suspected that people involved in fewer real world groups might have more need for support and thus use our community more and/or get more support from it. I'd need to check those analyses to be sure, but I seem to recall that we found the opposite. Suggesting that some people depend on groups for support and use all groups more. or something like that.
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