Posted by Mitchell on January 22, 2003, at 0:29:39
In reply to Re: How do people decide which groups to join?, posted by Dr. Bob on January 21, 2003, at 21:51:40
Thanks for returning challenging questions. I think in this post I was trying to support your deeper inquiry into how these processes work
> > I suspect much of the choice is guided by unconscious motivations. If a person grew up in an environment rich in conflict, a group where conflict exists side by side with caring conversation might be very familiar.
>
> So that would suggest looking at how much conflict and caring there is. Which would be really interesting. But hard to assess?Yes, at least quantitatively. Understanding motivations is probably much more difficult than measuring changes in behavior or perception. I still wonder if literary analysts haven't already developed some standard measures of emotionality in written works. I know lit scholars like to draw conclusions about personality and psyche from written works, but I don't know if the tools they use are applicable in a purely psychological inquiry.
> > If so, then one might see a correlation between the spread of conflict (administrative involvement could be a measure of conflict) and increase in numbers. The more difficult question would be whether increased population led to increased conflict, or whether the conflict attracted and reinforced the commitment of group members.
>
> That's an interesting idea, considering administrative involvement a measure of conflict, but there wouldn't be a consistent standard across groups (let alone within a group over time)...Well, yeh, its much easier to suggest research if one does not have to actually design and conduct the investigation. ; ) I am thinking per capita measurements - how many administrative actions per post, per member, per word ...
> Also, conflict might attract some people but deter others...
Or attract certain personality types and not others. Very hard to measure if you have little information about those who use the boards. This is like blind research, but in a different sense. Really, the more troubling concern for me is whether conflict from the board is contagious - if excitement started here might play out elsewhere. What is the half-life of ACTH?
Could be the other way too, though. Maybe people have conflicts here instead of with people they see f2f.
> Efficacy is definitely the $24,000 question. And is starting to be looked at. How would you compare administrative policies?
High bid for that answer on Ebay is currently $64,000. I thought you began to describe administrative styles in your Bestof? paper. (you just didn't describe alternatives sufficiently, for my satisfaction, and didn't objectively compare them, you just said why you prefer yours, as I recall).
I'm not well read into administrative approaches, but I think one main division would be between styles that ask, require, cajole or manipulate participants to control content and styles in which administrators control content by using word filters, removing posts and such methods. Enforcement actions per capita of posts yield some useful measure. Standard literary measures of administrative statements might be useful - are the statements orders or requests, are they informational reminders about group policy, or do administrators manage the site without interacting as much in the site's dialogue. You might have already considered measures like how many administrators per hit/uniquevisit/post/member or how many administrative hours compared to group activity.
> > It might also be worth an investigators time to review tools used for literary analysis. The taxonomy you suggest (questions vs. information vs. opinions vs. suggestions) might be all one could get their pencil around in one effort. But eventually, tools used in language and literature departments might contribute to a deeper understanding of how people use electronic publishing tools. Useful measures might include a count of first, second or third person voice, passive or active voice, and perhaps some regional correlation - some regions have different language patterns that might correspond with readability.
>
> Microsoft Word does tell you the % of sentences that are passive...
I'm not familiar with anything other than standard off-the-shelf grammar analysis tools like that, but I suspect I would find more advanced automated tools for analyzing language if I looked around some.
SM
poster:Mitchell
thread:8891
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20021128/msgs/8945.html