Support for something as common as speaking

I decided to use Google groups to find a support group for this assignment. I randomly came upon this group created by a man who came to the United States and found learning to speak the English language very difficult and wanted to create an atmosphere where English learners all over the world can freely learn to speak the language without feeling embarrassed or ashamed. My roommate and I coded 20 messages using Braithwaite's scheme and the results were as followed:

Our inter-rater reliability equaled 85% which meant that we had a pretty high agreement level and that our coding was accurate.

Information Support: 65%

• This was the biggest category that we found and considering the nature of the support group, this makes sense. Most of the information in the messages contained links to websites that helped with an aspect of the English language such as grammar.
  

Tangible assistance: 10%

• We were surprised to find such a large percentage of tangible assistance in these messages considering that this support group is global and participants are located all over the word. However this didn't stop the offers of books, willingness to help in anyway and in one case, even money.
  

Esteem Support: 60%

• This was also a very large category just as in Braithwaite's results. In the messages that contained this category we found others being very sympathetic about the difficult associated with learning the English language and lots of compliments on their improvements.
  

Network Support: 35%

• I was not surprised to find such a large percentage of support in this category, contrary to Braithwaite's findings because everyone in this group seemed to be so friendly and always willing to help. They also post to the discussions very frequently. The creator even creates a question of the week every week in which he allows for participants to improve their English reading and writing abilities and encourages them to comment every week even if it may be short.
  

Emotional Support: 45%

• This category was about the same as Braithwaite's results. A large percentage of the messages contained some sort of encouragement and understanding since they are all in the process of trying to learn the language. One person wrote, "What help me a lot in order to understand grammar in a good way is 'read' and 'write' I read every messages on this group, the discussion news message and try to reply all, so I can improve read and write without feel shame for mistakes. (People here are very friendly)"
  

Humor: 30%

• We also found a great deal of humor in these messages which was different from previous findings, probable because the participants in this group try a great deal to make everyone feel comfortable and welcomed and used humor as a way to do so.
  

 

Our findings differed from Braithwaite's in the numbers but not in the sense that our biggest categories were also information, esteem, and emotional support. Our result's also supported Walther's dimensions of attractions to online support in the sense that this support group is global and the participants have access to it 24/7 which is probably why it is so widely used by such a large number of people; that, and the fact that the participants in this group are so overwhelmingly friendly. It's nice to see what good the Internet can be used for.