Not logged in.

Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title Where should I send my post? The concept of discourse quality in online communities and its dependency on membership size
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Felix-Robinson Aschoff
  • Verena Schaer
  • Gerhard Schwabe
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
ISBN 978-1-4503-0824-3
Page Range 69 - 78
Event Title 5th International Conference on Communities & Technologies
Event Type conference
Event Location Brisbane, Australia
Event Start Date June 29 - 2011
Event End Date July 2 - 2011
Series Name Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies
Place of Publication Brisbane, Australia
Publisher Association for Computing Machinery
Abstract Text 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.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1145/2103354.2103364
Other Identification Number merlin-id:5880
PDF File Download from ZORA
Export BibTeX
EP3 XML (ZORA)