An epidemiological assessment of online groups and a test of a typology: What are the (dis)similarities of the online group types?

A vast multitude of online groups exist, and authors have been rapidly investigating their dynamics. Extant studies have provided great information on the effects of online group membership, but limitations are often noted in these studies. Amongst the most concerning limitations are issues of generalizability. Authors are often unsure whether their results are able to generalize to other online groups, including those that are seemingly similar. For this reason, some researchers have created typologies of online groups, in hopes that online groups that fall within the same category will be generalizable; however, no study has analyzed the merit of an online group typology, and conclusions are based upon speculation. For this reason, the current study analyzed the dynamics of three different online groups, which fall within separate categories of an online group typology: a cancer support forum, a LGBT forum, and a Harry Potter fan forum. The results demonstrate that these groups vary in their properties, including group members’ group identity, well-being, and social support. These results provide support for an online group typology, and precisely demonstrate in what manner these groups differ. Additionally, the results offer valuable information about the individual groups, as some variables were previously unstudied in some group types. The discovery of these previously unknown dynamics leads to the potential of new studies, which is discussed. Therefore, the current study provides important implications for future studies, as well as the interpretation of future research results.     

“I want to be different from others in cyberspace” The role of visual similarity in virtual group identity

The present study investigated the impact of the visual similarity shared among virtual group members on group identity and conformity. In achieving this goal, the current study distinguished the similarity coming from being in the same experimental group (i.e., transient group membership) and the similarity coming from the same social group membership (i.e., lasting group membership), in response to the critique that these two group memberships have not been set apart in previous computer-mediated group research. The current study also attended to the fact that previous research on computer-mediated groups restricted personality traits that might have affected group identity formation and conformity in virtual groups. In response to this constraint, the present study included participants’ needs to be different from others (NFU) and needs for inclusion (ISC) to a hypothesized path model that was founded on the SIDE model. Furthermore, the author examined whether the same hypothesized path model could uphold across the differentiated levels of similarity shared among group members.     

Research on the measure method of complaint theme influence on online social network

Consumer complaints on online social network quickly become online groups complaints through many people’s aggregation and looking on, interaction and word-of-mouth communication. Therefore, assessing and managing online complain influence has become a new problem for enterprise to listen to and manage online group complaints. This paper analyzed the complaint information feature of consumer group on online social network, from three-dimensional perspective of complaint text’s quality, transmission timeliness and user interaction degree. We built the influence measure model of online complaint theme based on entropy weight model by monitoring and analyzing real-time the static and dynamic properties of complaint information, explored the measure method of complaint theme influence, employed empirical method to verify the validity and provided scientific decision-making tools and methods for enterprise listening to and managing online group complains.     

The role of disclosure of personal information in the evaluation of risk and trust in young peoples’ online interactions

This study examined the relationship between the evaluation of risk, trust and disclosure of personal information in young peoples’ online interactions. A series of 18 focus groups were conducted with young people aged 9–19 years old. The results suggested that the majority of young people have a high level of awareness of the risks and potential outcomes associated with their online behaviour. Participants perceived disclosure of personal information to be important for the development of online relationships, and discussed associated strategies for evaluating trust and verifying identity. The study suggests that the perceived benefits associated with the disclosure of personal information and interacting with ‘strangers’ online may outweigh the perceived risks associated with these behaviours as the result of the importance of peer relationships and the exploration of identity during adolescence. Identified age-related differences and similarities in relation to the themes are explored, and areas for future research discussed.     

Influence of group configuration on online discourse reading

Online discourse reading plays a very important role in collaborative discussions. However, not many studies have examined the influence of group configuration on online discourse note reading. The current study examined note reading workloads and participants' perceptions of the three group configurations (large whole class, small whole class, large with subgroups) in online graduate-level courses from one institute. In this mixed-methods study, we analyzed tracking logs from 25 graduate-level online courses (25 instructors and 341 students) and interviews from 10 instructors and 12 graduate students with diverse backgrounds. Findings suggest that all three configurations had their own advantages and disadvantages in fostering online discourse reading. However, our analysis suggests that the advantages of subgroup discussions in supporting note reading outweigh those of the Small and Large configurations. The overload effects in information reading due to large class sizes can be minimized by dividing students into small groups for discussion purposes. Group configuration into proper-size groups may reduce students' reading loads. Interviewees felt that the waving of small groups into large classes benefited their collaborative discussions. We conclude this paper with a list of pedagogical recommendations and new software features that may help group configuration and enhance learning in online courses. This study may have implications for both practitioners and researchers to seek optimal group configurations to achieve more fruitful online discussions through note reading.     

Computer-mediated group support, anonymity, and the software inspection process: an empirical investigation

In software inspection, a key principle endorsed by Fagan (1986) is openness. However, scholars have recently questioned the efficacy of openness. For example, some argue that ego-involvement and personality conflicts that become more transparent due to openness might impede inspection. Still others point out that familiarity and (preexisting) relationships among inspection team members negatively affect the comprehensiveness in detection of defects. This brings up concerns if the openness as originally envisioned by Fagan may in fact lead to suboptimal outcomes. As the trend towards computer-based inspection continues, we believe that anonymity could play a positive role in overcoming some of the drawbacks noted in team-based inspection. Drawing upon the literature on software inspection and group support systems, this research proposes possible influences of group member anonymity on the outcome of computer-mediated software inspection and empirically examines the validity of the posited relationships in a set of controlled laboratory experiments. Two different inspection tasks with varying levels of software code complexity are employed. While both the control groups (i.e., teams without anonymity) and treatment groups (i.e., teams with support for anonymity) consume more or less the same time in performing the inspection tasks, the treatment groups are more effective in identifying the seeded errors in the more complex task. Treatment groups also express a more positive attitude toward both code inspection tasks. The findings of the study suggest a number of directions for future research.     

What to Tell About Me? Self‐Presentation in Online Communities

This paper investigates how the type of community and personal goals affect self‐presentation. In 3 online studies, we simulated the registration process in online communities, presenting either a common‐bond or a common‐identity community. Study 1 confirmed that members of the common‐bond community presented themselves in an individualizing manner, while members of the common‐identity community focused on characteristics shared among members of the community. Study 2 investigated underlying processes, showing that the goal to get in contact with other members was less salient in the common‐identity than in the common‐bond community. Study 3 demonstrated that community members actively manage their self‐presentation in accordance with personal goals. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for research and profile design.     

Influence of group member familiarity on online collaborative learning

This study investigated the effects of group member familiarity during computer-supported collaborative learning. Familiarity may have an impact on online collaboration, because it may help group members to progress more quickly through the stages of group development, and may lead to higher group cohesion. It was therefore hypothesized that increased familiarity would lead to (a) more critical and exploratory group norms, (b) more positive perceptions of online communication and collaboration, (c) more efficient and positive collaboration, and (d) better group performance. To investigate these hypotheses, 105 secondary education students collaborated in groups of three. The results of this study indicate that higher familiarity led to more critical and exploratory group norm perceptions, and more positive perceptions of online communication and collaboration. Furthermore, in familiar groups students needed to devote less time to regulating their task-related activities. The expectation that familiarity would lead to better group performance was not confirmed. These findings imply that online educators pay attention to the effects group member familiarity has on online collaborative learning.     

Comparing collaborative drawing tools and whiteboards: An analysis of the group process

Collaborative drawing tools, which are designed to allow multiple users to share an electronic drawing space, have recently become the focus of many researchers' efforts. While advances have been made in the technological implementation of these tools, little is known about the effect these tools have on group processes. This paper discusses a study that was conducted to compare groups using conventional (whiteboard) technology to those using collaborative drawing tools. The results of these two experiments provide evidence that these tools alter the way in, which groups work. For some types of tasks, the amount of interaction among group members using a collaborative drawing tool tends to be less than among groups using conventional technology. Groups using collaborative drawing tools tended to take significantly longer than whiteboard groups. Possible reasons for these results are further explored in this paper.     

An investigation of the validity of course‐based online assessment methods: The role of computer‐related attitudes and assessment mode preferences

The use of e‐assessment methods raises important concerns regarding the reliability and validity of these methods. Potential threats to validity include mode effects and the possible influence of computer‐related attitudes. Although numerous studies have now investigated the validity of online assessments in noncourse‐based contexts, few studies have addressed this issue in an educational context. The present study helps fill this research gap by investigating whether university students' computer‐related attitudes and assessment mode preferences were related to performance on a course‐based online assessment task. Overall, students' attitudes and preferences bore no greater relationships to performance on the online than offline module assessment tasks. This provides support for the validity of course‐based online assessment methods and should help alleviate educators' concerns and encourage more widespread adoption of these methods, helping address the issue of their slow uptake to date. Suggestions for follow‐up studies to corroborate and extend the current findings are offered.     

“I Have AIDS”: Content analysis of postings in HIV/AIDS support group on a Chinese microblog

With the widespread growth and adoption of new technologies, online platforms such as social network sites (SNSs) have become a channel for health information. Online groups have been set up for communication and interaction, among which many are for people with chronic illnesses, including people with HIV/AIDS (PHA). In the study of online communication behavior, the Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT) predicted people will develop deeper interpersonal relationships in online groups over time (Walther, 1996). However, the author argued that CMC content should be examined more closely to get a dynamic picture of how people interaction and how groups develop over time. Thus this paper attempted to refine SIPT by enriching the framework with detailed components, and used directed content analysis to categorize messages posted on the PHA Support Group on Sina Weibo, a China-based microblog. The results showed that the percentage of socio-emotional messages saw an increase of almost 1/3 over time, taking over informational messages as the major content in all online postings. Medical related informational messages surpassed non-medical related informational messages as time went by. Intimacy relationship messages saw drastic increase in the two time periods. This study refined SIPT by providing increased granularity of its categorization scheme to examine group communication more closely.     

Comparison of group recommendation algorithms

In recent years recommender systems have become the common tool to handle the information overload problem of educational and informative web sites, content delivery systems, and online shops. Although most recommender systems make suggestions for individual users, in many circumstances the selected items (e.g., movies) are not intended for personal usage but rather for consumption in groups. This paper investigates how effective group recommendations for movies can be generated by combining the group members’ preferences (as expressed by ratings) or by combining the group members’ recommendations. These two grouping strategies, which convert traditional recommendation algorithms into group recommendation algorithms, are combined with five commonly used recommendation algorithms to calculate group recommendations for different group compositions. The group recommendations are not only assessed in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of other qualitative aspects that are important for users such as diversity, coverage, and serendipity. In addition, the paper discusses the influence of the size and composition of the group on the quality of the recommendations. The results show that the grouping strategy which produces the most accurate results depends on the algorithm that is used for generating individual recommendations. Therefore, the paper proposes a combination of grouping strategies which outperforms each individual strategy in terms of accuracy. Besides, the results show that the accuracy of the group recommendations increases as the similarity between members of the group increases. Also the diversity, coverage, and serendipity of the group recommendations are to a large extent dependent on the used grouping strategy and recommendation algorithm. Consequently for (commercial) group recommender systems, the grouping strategy and algorithm have to be chosen carefully in order to optimize the desired quality metrics of the group recommendations. The conclusions of this paper can be used as guidelines for this selection process.     

A thematic analysis of patient communication in Parkinson’s disease online support group discussion forums

Online support groups have become a popular source of information, advice and support for individuals living with a range of health conditions. However, research has not commonly focused on patients living with Parkinson’s disease and their use of online support groups. Thus, the aim of this study was to gain an insight into the positive and negative aspects of online communication through an analysis of messages exchanged within Parkinson’s disease discussion forums. Data was collected from four forums and analysed using data-driven thematic analysis. The results revealed that participation in the forums allowed patients to share experiences and knowledge, form friendships, as well as helping them cope with the challenges of living with Parkinson’s disease. Conversely, a lack of replies, the experience of Parkinson’s disease symptoms, a lack of personal information, fragility of online relationships, misunderstandings and disagreements, all appeared to compromise the online experience. Practical implications and future research recommendations are proposed.     

Social group formation with mobile cloud services

Social networks have become quite popular these days, and the creation of social groups of people with common interests results in sharing and collaborative relationships between the members. Besides, cloud computing and mobile computing domains have advanced rapidly and are the promising technologies for the near future. Mobile technologies are recently drawing their attention to the cloud computing due to the increasing demand of the applications for processing power, storage space and energy. To bring the benefits from these different developments together, we tried to build an Android application, CroudSTag, which aids in forming social groups of common interest, from the mobile devices. The application obtains a set of pictures/videos from a storage cloud, uses cloud services like the video processing and the face recognition from multiple cloud providers to identify the people from the media content, and aids in forming social groups on facebook, a well-known social network. The application is explained along with detailed architectural and technological choices. The performance analysis of the application shows that the social groups can be formed with significant ease and reasonable performance latencies from the mobile devices.     

Supporting controversial CSCL discussions with augmented group awareness tools

This paper describes the development of augmented group awareness tools that take mutual user ratings of their online discussion contributions as input, aggregate these data, and visually feed these data back to the members in real time, thereby informing participants about how the group as a whole perceives their contributions. A specific group awareness tool was experimentally tested in a CSCL scenario using online controversies about a physics domain. The learning material was distributed across group members to create a situation where an individual minority member with a scientifically correct viewpoint faces a majority favoring a plausible, but incorrect viewpoint. It was hypothesized that in unsupported CSCL groups an incorrect majority would dominate a correct minority, whereas in groups that were supported by an augmented group awareness tool minority influence could be strengthened by making minority contributions salient. The paper reports results in support of this hypothesis, and discusses the mechanisms leading to the benefits of group awareness tools for collaborative learning.     

Literacy Sponsorship of the “My Online Friends” Discussion Board: Competing and Complementary Relationships

This article argues that we need to consider the complementary and competing relationships among the multiple types of sponsors of digital literacies. As we explore not just what people are reading and writing online, but also what sponsors fuel their motivations for doing so, we will have a better understanding of the constraints that accompany specific digital literacy opportunities, as well as what motivates individuals or groups to change their online reading and writing given these constraints.In this article, I discuss the relationships among the three commercial sponsors and one religious sponsor of the “My Online Friends” (MOF) discussion board, a group composed of approximately 120 women who are all members of the LDS, or Mormon, church. On the MOF discussion board, intersections among sponsors affect the women's establishment of group and individual identities and their use of relational literacy. In response to commercial sponsors’ coding and rules of use, which constrained the MOF women's religious and individual identity construction, the MOF women acted to change the commercial sponsorship of their spaces, yet they also adopted subject positions initially provided by commercial sponsors.     

The effects of source cues on online news perception

Among various interface cues, expertise, identity, and bandwagon cues have been consistently found to have significant effects on media users’ perceptions of online news content. To examine the effects of these three types of heuristic cues in the context of online news consumption, the current study involved a 2 (expertise cue: low vs. high) × 2 (identity cue: in-group vs. out-group) × 2 (bandwagon cue: low vs. high) online experiment. A total of 121 undergraduate students participated in the study. Significant two-way interaction effects between the expertise and bandwagon cues on perceived credibility suggested the positive combined effect of these two cues. Moreover, significant three-way interaction effects among expertise, identity and bandwagon cues indicated that the interaction effects between expertise and bandwagon cues tend to work as a function of the identity cue. While confirming the importance of the identity cue in users’ perceptions of online news, three-way interaction effects confirmed the co-occurrence of heuristic and systematic processing. The interaction effects also suggested that people process news systematically when the recommenders are out-group members, whereas they process news heuristically when the recommenders are in-group members. Theoretical as well as practical implications have also been discussed in this article.     

The structure of support: Mapping network evolution in an online support group

Online social support groups enable individuals to create specialized networks that provide access to a variety of resources. Although the efficacy of such communities has been studied, less understood are the structural mechanisms behind their emergence and the ways these mechanisms foster ties and may subsequently affect provision of support. This paper analyzes an online support group (OSG) for parents of children with ADD/ADHD over a one-year period, focusing on the interplay of structure and technology in the creation of the emergent support network. Findings highlight a dual network structure that supports a variety of relationships and levels of participation. Whereas a core group of members generates the initial content, the network becomes self-sustaining and supports a fluid membership between active and inactive members. Structurally, the network offers four types of support: direct, indirect, relational, and functional. Together, findings emphasize the interplay among technology, structure, and communication in advancing specialized channels of communication in a digital age.     

Using group communication to monitor web-based group learning

Abstract  In a web group-learning environment, students must communicate with other group members on the Internet to accomplish group projects and share knowledge. Communication is likely to affect performance and so analysing the relationship between communicative relationships and group performance may help teachers to monitor groups effectively. Certain tasks are necessary to perform such an analysis — recording group communication, extracting communication relationships and determining the relationship between group communication and group performance. This study developed a method for determining relationships and rules for predicting performance to enable teachers to take act appropriately according to the predicted performance of the group. Four group performance indicators are considered — average grades within a group, project grade, frequency of resource-sharing and drop-out rate. Experimental results are presented, concerning the application of the methodology to a web class of 706 students, divided into 70 groups. The experimental results show that group communication patterns significantly affect group performance.