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

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Springer, London

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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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Aschoff, Felix-Robinson; Schaer, Verena; Schwabe, Gerhard (2011): Where should I send my post?: the concept of discourse quality in online forums and its dependency on membership size. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies - C&T '11. DOI: 10.1145/2103354.2103364. Springer, London. pp. 69-78. Full Papers. The Edge, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. 29 June – 2 July 2011

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Online forums, online communities, discourse quality, member activity, content analysis

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Number of citations to item: 4

  • Aditya Johri, Seungwon Yang (2017): Scaffolded Help for Learning, In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, doi:10.1145/3083671.3083694
  • Yanli Zhang, Xinmiao Li, Weiguo Fan (2019): User adoption of physician's replies in an online health community: An empirical study, In: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 10(71), doi:10.1002/asi.24319
  • Xiaomo Liu, G. Alan Wang, Weiguo Fan, Zhongju Zhang (2020): Finding Useful Solutions in Online Knowledge Communities: A Theory-Driven Design and Multilevel Analysis, In: Information Systems Research 3(31), doi:10.1287/isre.2019.0911
  • Joachim Griesbaum, Nadine Mahrholz, Kim von Löwe Kiedrowski, Marc Rittberger (2015): Knowledge generation in online forums: a case study in the German educational domain, In: Aslib Journal of Information Management 1(67), doi:10.1108/ajim-09-2014-0112
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