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Her research begins with a meticulous qualitative and quantitative content analysis of two weeks of e-mail correspondence exchanged through the SOL-Cancer Forum. She assembles compelling documentation of the multi-dimensional content of social support requested and provided by SOLers. Her research illuminates the surprising range of expressive content in the emails among group members. Another unexpected finding, consistent with other studies of online support groups, is that information and advice about cancer treatment and care occupy a distant third position behind emotional support and expressions of companionship that constitute the preponderant content of e-mail exchanges.
Bambina’s most important contribution is to move research beyond the current preoccupation with describing and categorizing the content of online support groups to a more highly detailed exploration of the internal structure of online support groups. She demonstrates that not all individuals logging onto the website benefit equally from the support available from online groups. To create and then appropriate support require that individual members invest time and effort in becoming visible contributors. Bambina elucidates the processes of producing online support through a novel combination of social network analysis to describe the social structure of the support group and organizational contingency theory to predict the types of support requested and provided as a function of social and network positions occupied by support group members.
This book’s unique contribution to the current online support literature is Bambina’s application of social network analysis. The introduction of social network analysis shifts conceptual imagery of online support from the group to the network as the domain of analysis. In doing so, the network analysis captures the open and ill-defined boundaries of online support from the closed nature of group membership of the traditional face-to-face support group. The network imagery also shifts theoretical attention from the overall texture of email content to the flows of communications among support group members.