| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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The star actor, the prime givers, and the serious members share a significantly large portion of all three kinds of support. The moderate users receive some emotional support and a greater amount of informational support, but they do not significantly reciprocate either. Finally, the takers do not contribute any support to the Forum and only receive informational support in small quantities.
Thus far the research has documented the kinds of support found on the Forum and the network’s social structure. Analyzing the two simultaneously has established the relationship between network relations and the transmission of social support that is present on the Forum. The reasons why the relationship develops in this manner, however, have only been deduced from the analyses and not systematically evaluated. The next two chapters use a theory of optimal matching to demonstrate how and why social support is transmitted within the network’s social structure. Expanded organization contingency theory states that the structure of groups varies and the structure of tasks varies such that support will be provided when a group’s structure is optimally matched to the structure of a task that will provide support. The task-specific model provides a framework for optimal matching by outlining seven dimensions along which groups and tasks can be matched. The model is modified to be applied to online relations within a social network context by adapting the dimensions to reflect the structure of an electronic social network and online social support. Once designed, the network support-specific model is employed to provide a precise analysis of the interplay between network characteristics and the transmission of social support by matching five structural features of the network with the three categories of social support found on the Forum. To do so, the theory and model are used to generate six hypotheses, one for each category of support requested and provided, that are successively tested.