Form and structure of newsgroups giving social support: A network approach

Previous research has confirmed that newsgroups offer different forms of so cial support for their "members." One major distinction which emerged was t hat between newsgroups that offer more informational support and those that offer a mix of informational and other aspects of social support. In this study, we conduct a simple form of network analysis of the pattern of share d posts on a newsgroup to reveal the structure of the group. Clear and stri king differences between the networks from the different types of group are demonstrated. Further, multi-social support group is revealed to be more c omplex, as predicted. This finding is supported by an examination of some o f the messages that are posted to it. We argue, as others have previously d one, that social network analysis is a very useful method when researching the nature of computer-mediated communication.