research-article

Where should I send my post?: the concept of discourse quality in online forums and its dependency on membership size

Authors:

Felix-Robinson Aschoff,

Gerhard SchwabeAuthors Info & Claims

C&T '11: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies

Pages 69 - 78

https://doi.org/10.1145/2103354.2103364

Published: 29 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Today's Web users are faced with a large number of available online communities for every domain. While there are rules-of-thumb for the choice of a specific community, the validity of these heuristics has hardly been tested empirically. Furthermore, there is a lack of well-founded measures that allow for a systematic comparison of different online forum communities. In this contribution, we propose the concept of discourse quality as a means to this end. This measure is conceptualized from a user perspective and combines quantitative as well as qualitative parts, including a codebook for content analysis. To show the applicability and the usefulness of this measure, we systematically compare 34 online forums with varying degrees of membership size. We are able to show that the forums with the most members online consistently show high discourse quality. Finally, we discuss the potential of benchmark measures for future online community research.

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Cited By

Liu XWang GFan WZhang Z(2020)Finding Useful Solutions in Online Knowledge Communities: A Theory-Driven Design and Multilevel AnalysisInformation Systems Research10.1287/isre.2019.0911Online publication date: 7-May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2019.0911
Zhang YLi XFan W(2019)User Adoption of Physician's Replies in an Online Health Community: An Empirical StudyJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24319Online publication date: 14-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24319
Johri AYang SSchuler DLewkowicz MRohde MMulder I(2017)Scaffolded Help for LearningProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3083671.3083694(149-158)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3083671.3083694
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Where should I send my post?: the concept of discourse quality in online forums and its dependency on membership size
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Interaction paradigms
      1. Web-based interaction
2. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
  2. Information storage systems

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cover image ACM Other conferences

C&T '11: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies

June 2011

193 pages

ISBN:9781450308243

DOI:10.1145/2103354

Conference Chair:
Marcus Foth
Queensland University of Technology
,
Program Chairs:
Jesper Kjeldskov
Aalborg University, Denmark
,
Jeni Paay
Aalborg University, Denmark

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 29 June 2011

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C&T '11: Communities and Technologies

June 29 - July 2, 2011

Brisbane, Australia

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Cited By

Liu XWang GFan WZhang Z(2020)Finding Useful Solutions in Online Knowledge Communities: A Theory-Driven Design and Multilevel AnalysisInformation Systems Research10.1287/isre.2019.0911Online publication date: 7-May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2019.0911
Zhang YLi XFan W(2019)User Adoption of Physician's Replies in an Online Health Community: An Empirical StudyJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24319Online publication date: 14-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24319
Johri AYang SSchuler DLewkowicz MRohde MMulder I(2017)Scaffolded Help for LearningProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3083671.3083694(149-158)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3083671.3083694
Griesbaum JMahrholz Nvon Löwe Kiedrowski KRittberger M(2015)Knowledge generation in online forums: a case study in the German educational domainAslib Journal of Information Management10.1108/AJIM-09-2014-011267:1(2-26)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2015
https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-09-2014-0112

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