Message Board Posts Research Articles

A theme analysis of experiences reported by adult children of alcoholics in online support forums

Growing up with an alcoholic parent can have a lasting effect on children and contribute to a variety of challenging outcomes in adulthood. This study identified the various experiences that adult children of alcoholics (ACoA) discuss with their peers in online support groups. Trained coders conducted a thematic analysis of 504 message board posts collected over a period of 60 days from three different online support groups to identify issues that children of alcoholics face in adulthood. Seven themes emerged from the analysis: (a) empowerment through support, (b) interference of parent in adulthood, (c) connection to inner child and need to re-parent, (d) low self-esteem and insecurity, (e) anger and resentment, (f) romantic relationship problems, and (g) problems communicating. The results of this study provide insight into the issues that ACoA need to address as part of their own recovery and suggest avenues of exploration for practitioners who work with high-risk families.

Online communities for breast cancer survivors: a review and analysis of their characteristics and levels of use

Online communities have been heralded as one of the most promising health resources on the Internet. The purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics and levels of use of online communities for breast cancer survivors. Using Google, we identified websites with a string of computer-mediated communication terms and individual queries of three to five words of online community terms. This was complemented by a review of website resource lists and personal libraries. Two reviewers independently extracted information on their general characteristics and number of members and message board posts. A coding scheme guided content analysis. We found 111 websites. Most sites (n = 64, 65.8 %) had a broad focus (e.g., health, cancer, or general). One third (n = 38, 34.2 %) were exclusive to breast cancer and 11 catered to specific disease characteristics. The majority were American (n = 79, 75.2 %), nonprofit (55.0 %), and moderated (69.5 %). Most moderators (85.7 %) were staff or community members; eight sites were moderated by health professionals. Greater than one-third of sites (n = 40, 36 %) were initiated by breast cancer survivors or loved ones. Breast cancer-specific sites contained a total of 4,186,275 posts. One-third (n = 10) contained 93.4 % of posts, displaying over 100,000 posts each. As of April 3, 2012, eight sites were discontinued. There is a wide range of online communities available for breast cancer survivors with extensive archives of personal illness experiences. Future efforts should focus on identifying the factors that determine their success and effectiveness.

Identifying potential adverse effects using the web: A new approach to medical hypothesis generation

Medical message boards are online resources where users with a particular condition exchange information, some of which they might not otherwise share with medical providers. Many of these boards contain a large number of posts and contain patient opinions and experiences that would be potentially useful to clinicians and researchers. We present an approach that is able to collect a corpus of medical message board posts, de-identify the corpus, and extract information on potential adverse drug effects discussed by users. Using a corpus of posts to breast cancer message boards, we identified drug event pairs using co-occurrence statistics. We then compared the identified drug event pairs with adverse effects listed on the package labels of tamoxifen, anastrozole, exemestane, and letrozole. Of the pairs identified by our system, 75–80% were documented on the drug labels. Some of the undocumented pairs may represent previously unidentified adverse drug effects.

A system for de-identifying medical message board text

There are millions of public posts to medical message boards by users seeking support and information on a wide range of medical conditions. It has been shown that these posts can be used to gain a greater understanding of patients’ experiences and concerns. As investigators continue to explore large corpora of medical discussion board data for research purposes, protecting the privacy of the members of these online communities becomes an important challenge that needs to be met. Extant entity recognition methods used for more structured text are not sufficient because message posts present additional challenges: the posts contain many typographical errors, larger variety of possible names, terms and abbreviations specific to Internet posts or a particular message board, and mentions of the authors’ personal lives. The main contribution of this paper is a system to de-identify the authors of message board posts automatically, taking into account the aforementioned challenges. We demonstrate our system on two different message board corpora, one on breast cancer and another on arthritis. We show that our approach significantly outperforms other publicly available named entity recognition and de-identification systems, which have been tuned for more structured text like operative reports, pathology reports, discharge summaries, or newswire.

Intragroup status and social presence in online fan groups

Low and high status member posts from online fan message board posts were examined. Low status members, as compared to high status members, were found to use more intimacy and immediacy social presence cues, including: praise for the group, self-disclosure, friendly and positive affective language, first person singular pronouns, and present tense verbs. Low status members were less likely than high status members to use articles, larger words, and discrepancy words. Lastly, low status members were rated as more likeable than high status members. The results suggest that low status members may strategically use social presence cues as a means of ingratiating themselves to the group.

Review: Hundt, Nesselhauf and Biewer (eds, 2006) Corpus Linguistics and the Web. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi

Corpus Linguistics and the Web is an edited collection of articles from papers presented at the 2004 symposium ‘Corpus Linguistics – Perspectives for the Future’ held in Heidelberg in 2004, and articles commissioned from leading scholars (p. 4). The book is a comprehensive, insightful and well-structured compendium of advantages and disadvantages of using web data for linguistic description and corpus compilation. The main message conveyed by the book, as a whole, is that traditional corpora and web data can complement each other. The book is a good resource for corpus linguists who find traditional corpora too small, or not sufficiently representative, for their research. It can also be useful for computational linguists and information scientists who are interested in linguistic and textual features. The book begins with a short introduction written by the three editors, Hundt, Nesselhauf and Biewer, that summarises the main issues and perspectives. The volume is divided into four parts, each containing a variable number of articles. The first part, ‘Accessing the web as corpus’, describes the benefits and the pitfalls of using data from the web. On the one hand, shortcomings, such as the impossibility of replication and the absence of meta-data (Ludelink et al.; and Fletcher), must be kept in mind when assessing findings from web data. On the other hand, the richness and freshness of web material (Fletcher; and Renouf et al.) seem to outweigh the downside, and encourage the development of web-as-corpus applications or other such initiatives (e.g., WaCky, WebKWIC and WebCorp). One major drawback of the web-as-corpus approach is, however, the reliance on commercial search engines (like Google) that have very rough linguistic sensibilities. These decide the relevant pages for a search using opaque criteria, and so require tedious refinements of the results that are returned. The second part, ‘Compiling corpora from the internet’, focusses on the construction of corpora from the web – an unrivalled textual reservoir in terms of size and new genres or registers. For instance, Hoffmann takes advantage of the plenitude of publicly available CNN transcripts in order to create a specialised corpus of spoken English. Similarly, Claridge builds a corpus of public message board postings and examines how interaction and stance markers are distributed in this genre of computer-mediated

Gendered Bodies: Negotiating Normalcy and Support

AbstractResearch on gender and negotiation typically focuses on formal bargaining about salary and compensation. This work needs to be expanded to everyday negotiations in the workplace, especially negotiations on organizational issues deemed germane to women. Drawing from research on work‐life issues, this study focuses on how women frame problems about menopause at work in ways that make them open to negotiation. Specifically, it examines message board posts on an online discussion board to see how issues are named, blamed, and claimed and how this framing situates them as interests, rights, or power concerns that foster or hinder opportunities for negotiation.

The Impact of Blog Recommendations on Security Prices and Trading Volumes

Previous research and recent statements by the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that e-mail spam and message board posts are often used to manipulate markets in a variation of the classical pump-and-dump scheme, leading to temporary market reactions followed by price reversals. In contrast, I hypothesize that financial blogs spread genuine information leading to permanent market adjustments. I investigate stock recommendations on blogs and find that bloggers tend to write about liquid securities issued by large firms; I also find that bloggers offer short advice consistent with momentum strategies but long advice consistent with contrarian strategies. To test the hypothesis that stock recommendations on blogs impact both prices and trading volumes of the touted securities, I collect recommendations from blogs and analyze returns and trading volumes on the days surrounding publication; I offer evidence to support my hypothesis and I find some evidence of market reaction being stronger for short recommendations. I hypothesize and test that the magnitude of the market reaction depends on the market capitalization of the touted firm, on the size of the blog's audience, on the depth of the analysis of the blog post and on the perceived skill of the blog's author. I find that the market appears to react more strongly to recommendations given by holders of a graduate degree in Finance or Economics; the other hypothesized factors do not have an impact on the magnitude of the reaction. Finally, I document the absence of price reversals in the twenty days following blog publication, giving support to the hypothesis that blogs offer genuine information.

The discursive construction of identity in an Internet hip-hop community

In this paper, the Internet message board forum is proposed as an example of a community of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992) in which contributors exhibit common linguistic conventions and forms of participation. The emergence of individual identities in interaction is examined in the genre-specific context of hip-hop Internet message boards. A corpus analysis of message board postings clearly shows that contributors systematically exploit the spoken and written qualities of the language of message boards, the " third medium" (Crystal, 2001) to identify themselves linguistically. Linguistic conventions or practices reveal a tendency among contributors to discursively construction their identities via a "social positioning of self and other" (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005) as experts or non-experts in the hip-hop community. Contributors' identities as experts or simply in-group members are further corraborated or established by the codification not only of non-standard pronunciations and grammar characteristic of speech, but also of non-standard orthography, which demands a written forum to be appreciated, as it is neutralized and unremarkable in speech. Because of the written and spoken qualities of message board discourse, both the content and the form of postings can be manipulated to showcase familiarity with hip-hop discursive practices. Internet message boards therefore represent the ideal forum for discursively constructing a hip-hop identity.

EInformation: A Clinical Study of Investor Discussion and Sentiment

We examine the information flow for four stocks over seven months to trace the relationship between on-line discussion, news activity, and stock price movements. On-line discussions support numerous unsubstantiated rumors, substantial on-point exchanges, and quick dissemination of imminent and recently released information. Applying language-processing routines to message board postings and news, we create sentiment and disagreement measures or eInformation. We analyze the determinants of sentiment and disagreement, and trace links between news, eInformation, and stock returns. This intensive clinical study of on-line discussions suggests mechanisms individual investors and groups can use to analyze and digest company information.

Noise Trading and Volatility: Evidence from Day Trading and Message Boards

This paper tests the hypothesis that noise trading increases volatility. We argue that day traders are noise traders, and we use stock message board postings on Raging Bull and Yahoo to proxy for day trading. We find evidence that day trading increases volatility for a sample of large NASDAQ stocks during the 3rd quarter of 1999. Regulators have expressed concern that day trading destabilizes stock prices. Although we support the argument that day trading causes some increase in volatility, our results suggest that the direction of causation is primarily the reverse.