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Bambina applies social network methodology to explore the internal structuring of the online support group. She measures the volume, direction, and content of message flows between members and constructs network sociograms to display the social patterning of online support. After making a first cut between support givers and takers, she constructs measures of network centrality to distinguish different giver statuses: the star, the singular actor at the center of online activities, and three collective social positions: the prime givers, the serious members and the moderate users.
Bambina applies network analysis to relate how the network statuses patterns who requests and who provides information, emotional support, and companionship. An intriguing side-excursion of her network analysis is an investigation of the extent to which the prime givers may act as a collective functional substitute for the network star. She shows that the prime givers convey ample amounts of support between themselves and with the serious users. However the star plays a unique role in overall network maintenance. The star, in the case of this online support group, is singularly responsible for sustaining contact with the less frequent users and takers in the group.
The second contribution Bambina makes is in applying Eugene Litwak’s expanded organizational contingency theory to elucidate the hidden rules and protocols that govern who will request and who will provide different forms of social support. Contingency theory conceives social support as tasks that groups perform, and formulates a series of parallel dimensions for classifying both group structure and task properties (for example group size parallels the number of individuals needed to efficiently perform a task). By identifying optimal matches between group structure and the properties of the tasks they can perform along each dimension, one makes theoretical predictions about relative rates of requests and provisions of different forms of social support.