Starting summer 2009, I worked with Dr. Christopher Yang to look into online health support groups. First step is to observe different websites to know which ones are available to whom, and what purpose they serve to the public. After comparing several communities, two were selected for in-depth study and compared with three well known general social networking tools.
Understanding information user in society requires knowledge of all contexts, including health – i.e. patients who participate in online forums. Social netowrking is useful to patients who wish to connect with each other to share information or give and receive social support. We looked at five social networking websites aimed towards health usage (medhelp, patientslikeme) and for general purpose (tweeter, myspace, facebook). In depth examination shows that each website supports different features for initiating friendships, message types, and even communciation purpose that are unique to each. This work is a piece of ongoing project that identifies the landscape of health online support groups.
Online forums allow users to seek support by overcoming geographic and time boundaries. Previous studies were limited on the categories of social support examined. Also, patterns of online vs face-to-face support. Three months of forum threads on MedHelp’s Alcoholism discussion group were examined for social support types using content analysis. Data was previously collected by a web crawler. Content analysis was performed with an extended coding scheme supported by literuature review - the results show that there are different levels of support preseted in the communities. This work is a piece of an ongoing project that identifies the communication patterns of patients in online support groups.
Goal: iConference Paper
For this term in the INFO624 Information Retrieval Systems course, Dr. Carl Drott and I have agreed on an enrichment project that involves conducting a literature review of the recently published papers to assess the value of information in social networking. This topic was selected because it is relevant to my research interst of studying online health support groups, which can be views as social networking in the health context. In addition, the issue of information retrieval and social networking sites has been much in the news recently, i.e. Google Social Search. Knowing about recently published research efforts will contribute towards relating my research projects with those of colleagues in the research community and also help to generate new ideas.
Goal: AMIA Symposium poster or presentation
This project is part of my RA work with Dr. Lisl Zach. The research question is, “What do employers who want to hire KM or CI professionals look for?” and will be a content analysis following grounded theory on job postings. The selection criteria for data collection will be decided after a thorough understanding of previous studies on content analysis of job advertisements.
Working Bibliography
For this poster, I used a dataset provided by Dr. Lisl Zach that was collected from a survey. The answers from two of the questions were selected for this analysis: years in job and a list of top skills/knowledge each respondent felt was necessary to be successful in that kind of job. The questions were open ended, so content analysis was required. After the coding process, I was able to find total numbers for each type of skill (i.e. research, communication, etc). These numbers were the basis for creating the charts on the poster.
Reference Kuhlthau, C. C. (1999). The role of experience in the information search process of an early career information worker: Perceptions of uncertainty, complexity, construction, and sources. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(5), 399-412.
Abstract Background: Current literature speculates that experts and novices differ in their perceptions of task complexity, process of thought construction, and selection of information sources. This poster will address the question: How do perceptions of job skills vary between novices and experts in competitive intelligence workers?
Data Collection: Data were taken from an online questionnaire given to members of SCIP to determine which skills and background they feel are most important for professional success. The applicable responses are those describing job activities and list of perceived necessary skills.
Data Analysis: The study includes both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first, content analysis of open-ended questions. In the second, basic statistical methods will be performed to find correlations between years and keywords for each group.
Expected Findings: The results will provide a comparison between novices and experts. Since the role of experience is a factor, data should show that each group will have different perceptions of job skills.
This project is something I’m working on as part of the enrichment component of Digital Libraries class with Dr. Xia Lin. The research question is, “What are users searching for in the Internet Public Library (IPL) and what are some characteristics of their queries?” Transaction log analysis will be done on IPL search queries. The specifics on data collection and analysis will be decided at a later time, after a review of related literature.
Working Bibliography
This project is primarily getting practice doing multivariate analysis on a large dataset and using a web crawler, without a goal of getting published yet. The tentative research question is, “What are ALA-approved LIS program specialties based on an analysis of course descriptions?” The type of analysis has not been decided yet.
Working Bibliography