Online Social Support: The Interplay of Social Networks and Compu ...

Those who study them as groups assume that they know the membership and boundaries of the groups. … By contrast, those who study such entities as social networks can treat their membership and boundaries as open questions. … The patterns of relationships become a research question rather than a given” (p. 180). Moreover, the common practice of treating all those who participate in an online forum as a group, that is, a small number of long-term participants who all have relationships with one another, is inaccurate when analyzing naturally occurring⁶ Internet forums. They tend to be large in numbers, membership is fluid, and participation varies enormously (Baym, 2000; Mickelson, 1997; Sharf, 1997). Social network analysis reserves the use of the term “group” for meaningful subsets of the larger social networks that have a large extent of connectivity between their members and are tightly knit. Groups can further be specified as a clique where all members have direct relationships or a cluster where a majority, but not all members, have direct relationships. The ability to distinguish and categorize meaningful patterns of relations from the larger collectivity provides the opportunity to analyze their impact on the transmission of social support. For example, Wellman and Gulia (1999) documented that in traditional social networks, support with large domestic tasks, emergency matters, and long-term assistance was enhanced in smaller sized groups with greater connectivity, whereas companionship and information were described as more available in diffuse networks (see also, Haines & Hurlbert, 1992; Walker et al., 1994).

Some researchers have attempted to characterize variations within online groups or forums by categorizing members by level of participation such as heavy, moderate, and light posters (Boberg et al., 1995; Dunham et al., 1998; Korenman & Wyatt, 1996; Rodgers & Chen, 2005). This method does shed some light on the transmission of social support in a forum, however, its focus on the individual limits its ability to offer insight into the relationships formed by different levels of participation.