Social capital and social support on the web: the case of an internet mother site.
Do virtual communities in cyberspace foster social capital and social support? Using participant observation and discourse analysis, we examine a mothering board on a parent's website and investigate whether social capital was present, and if so, how it was developed and used. We find three main types of communication emerge from our analysis: emotional support, instrumental support--both formal and informal, and community building/protection, all of which contribute to the creation and maintenance of social capital. Additionally, using sampling with replacement, we created a final data set of 180 mothers and report descriptive statistics to identify characteristics of those on the board.
Drentea
Patricia
P
Department of Sociology, University of Alabama-Birmingham, 239-E Ullman Building, 1212 University Boulevard, Birmingham, AL 35294-3350, USA. pdrentea@uab.edu
Moren-Cross
Jennifer L
JL
D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology*; D016487:Parenting / Q000523:psychology* / Q000639:trends; D011247:Pregnancy; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D012934:Social Isolation; D012944:Social Support; D012962:Sociology, Medical; D014584:User-Computer Interface