Virtual community support for offline communities through online newspaper message forums

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 87, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 154-169

  Rosenberry, Jack ^a  

^a ST JOHN FISHER COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77954475065     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769901008700109     Document Type: Review

References (44)

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3. Howard Rheingold, The; Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
4. The term is in quotation marks because it is borrowed from Keith N. Hampton and Barry Wellman, "Netville Online and Offline: Observing and Surveying a Wired Suburb," The American Behavioral Scientist 43 (November/December 1999): 475-92.
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7. Robert Kling, "Synergies and Competition between Life in Cyberspace and Face-to-Face Communities," Social Science Computer Review 14 (April 1996): 50-54. Also available at: http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/archive/kling/pubs/ CYB97A.htm (accessed May 22, 2008).
8. Hampton and Wellman, "Netville Online and Offline."
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13. Ridings and Gefen, "Virtual Community Attraction."
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19. David Silver, "Selling Cyberspace: Constructing and Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Community," The Southern Communication Journal 70 (spring 2005): 187-99, 189.
20. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
21. Blanchard and Horan, "Virtual Communities and Social Capital."
22. Robert Kraut, Michael Patterson, Vicki Lundmark, Sara Kiesler, Tridas Mukopadhyay, and William Scherlis, "Internet Paradox: A Social Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological WellBeing?" American Psychologist 53 (September 1998): 1017-31.
23. Hampton and Wellman, "Netville Online and Offline," 476.
24. Blanchard and Horan, "Virtual Communities and Social Capital," 17.
25. Kling, "Synergies and Competition."
26. Sorin Matei, "The Impact of State-Level Social Capital on the Emergence of Virtual Communities," Journal of Broadcasting & ElectronicMedia 48 (March 2004): 23-40.
27. Hopkins et al., "Social Capital and Community Building."
28. M. Kent Jennings and Vicki Zeitner, "Internet Use and Civic Engagement: A Longitudinal Analysis," Public Opinion Quarterly 67 (fall 2003): 311-34.
29. Matei, "The Impact of State-Level Social Capital."
30. Dhavan v. Shah, Nojin Kwak, and R. Lance Holbert, "Connecting and Disconnecting With Civic Life: Patterns of Internet Use and the Production of Social Capital," Political Communication 18 (April-June 2001): 141-62.
31. Ridings and Gefen, "Virtual Community Attraction."
32. Project for Excellence in Journalism, "State of the News Media 2009."
33. The frequency choices in the survey questions about level of forum activity were: 1 = several times a day; 2 = about once a day; 3 = a few times a week; 4 = a few times a month; 5 = less than once a month.
34. RQ1, RQ2, and RQ3 used a 4-point agreement scale of 1 = strongly agree; 2 = somewhat agree; 3 = somewhat disagree; 4 = strongly disagree for the dependent variable. RQ4 and RQ5 used a 5-point frequency scale of how often the respondents had engaged in the behaviors of contacting someone or attending an event, with 1 = never; 2 = 1 or 2 times; 3 = 3 to 5 times; 4 = 6 to 10 times; and 5 = more than 10 times.
35. For example, a similar control procedure was used in Matei, "The Impact of State-Level Social Capital."
36. All three dummy variables were coded no = 0, yes = 1. In the survey, respondents actually were offered three responses to the question "How many of the people whose comments you read most frequently and respond to most frequently on the message forums do you know personally in the offline world?"; those responses were "None of them," "Some of them," and "Most of them/all of them." However, only a tiny fraction of respondents - about 1.5% (n = 7) - answered "Most of them/all of them." So those answers were combined with the "Some of them" reply (32.6%, n = 164) to create a dichotomous variable of knowing some respondents offline vs. not knowing any.
37. The number of community groups was entered as an interval variable ranging from 0 to 5, where 0 = membership in no groups up to 5 = membership in 5 or more. Volunteer hours were coded similarly, ranging from 0 = "don't volunteer" to 5 = more than 40 hours a month spent in volunteer efforts.
38. Thomas D. Cook and Donald T. Campbell, Quasi-experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
39. Vincent Price and John Zaller, "Who Gets the News? Alternative Measures of News Reception and Their Implications for Research," Publi'c Opinion Quarterly 57 (summer 1993): 133-64.
40. Shah, Kwak, and Holbert, "Connecting and Disconnecting With Civic Life."
41. Jennings and Zeitner, "Internet Use and Civic Engagement."
42. Kraut et al., "Internet Paradox."
43. Eric M. Uslaner, "Trust, Civic Engagement, and the Internet," Political Communication 21 (April-June 2004): 223-42.
44. Project for Excellence in Journalism, "State of the News Media 2009."