Friday, November 26, 2010

Vancouver, BC 2011?

The research team wanted to update all of our followers on our progress.  We have tweaked our paper, conducted multiple data manipulations and submitted our paper to CHI 2011 (http://www.chi2011.org/).  We received some very useful feedback from the reviewers and have since submitted our rebuttal.  With all of our hard work and a little luck we hope to participate in the conference which is located in Vancouver, BC this year!

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Presentation Update

Thanks for listening! See below for our powerpoint from today's presentation.

Feedback, suggestions, and concerns are greatly appreciated. Please feel free to also email us at uncommonground4500@gmail.com.



Digital Bereavementarticulating the unheard utterances...


A more detailed update to come soon.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Research Update

Uncommon Ground has been hard at work this past month advancing our research on the relationship between grief and Facebook profiles, despite a recent lack of posts. After much deliberation, we have decided to narrow our research to focus specifically on analyzing the differences between language used in pre-death Facebook wall posts with that of post-death posts. Using pre-death posts as our control, we believe (and fervently hope) that the differences between pre- and post-death language use patterns which emerge from our analysis will ultimately shine light on motivations behind posting on deceased Facebook users’ walls. Here is where we currently stand in the research process:

THE DATA
We have collected data from the Facebook walls of twelve deceased Facebook users. Two sets of data exist for each profile: (1) all post-death wall posts, and (2) all pre-death wall posts within one year of the death. Items such as comments, notes, Facebook gifts, quizzes, status updates, and recent activity were deleted and not included in our data analysis as we are interested specifically in language use and not the use of other applications that the social network, Facebook, offers.

THE PREDICTIONS
In a rough sketch of our hypotheses, we defined several categories for comparative analysis, including, but not limited to:
  • complexity: we predict post-death wall posts will be more complex (i.e. higher word count, more six-letter words, longer sentences, more punctuation).
  • intimacy: we predict post-death wall posts will have greater intimacy.
  • positive & negative emotion: we predict post-death posts will use more positive emotion words.
  • verb tense: we predict more future tense usage in pre-death posts, and more past tense in post-death posts.
  • personal pronouns: we predict post-death posts to show a greater use of personal pronouns.
  • other…
  • religion: more religion-related language post-death
  • spacial terms: more spacial terms post-death
  • relative words: more relative words post-death

THE ANALYSES
We are currently in the process of analyzing our data using LIWC, WMATRIX and SPSS. Although we have begun to analyze our first profiles, we need to add results from more profiles to the mix before we can identify patterns.


Additionally, we are finessing the theoretical bases of our research and working on applying several theories (continuing bond, uses and gratifications, back stage/front stage emotion) to language analysis. We would highly appreciate any feedback/suggestions you may have on the theory-language connection or on our research in general.

Within the next week, Uncommon Ground will be working on analyzing all results to begin to identify patterns and form conclusions. Stay tuned for future posts on analyses and theories.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Continuing Bonds Theory

Most of the twentieth century was marked by the idea that people should get past the death of a loved one by detaching themselves emotionally. They could then free the energy they had expended towards the deceased and reinvest it elsewhere. In fact, failure to let go of a relationship towards the deceased was viewed as pathological grief.

Alternatively, Continuing Bond theory revolves around the idea that people maintain a relationship with those they have lost. According to the theory, people have a morphing continued relationship with the dead, finding a changed but still present place to situate the relationship in their lives. This phenomenon is not considered problematic, and in fact “the deceased can provide resources for enriched functioning in the present” (Klass, Silverman, and Nickman).

It is this precisely the presence of a bonds continued through Facebook wall posts that drew us to our research topic. Among other things, we would like to find out if continued bonds have evolved from a discouraged and unhealthy coping behavior to a social norm among Facebook wall-posters. To pinpoint this phenomenon, we will look at the presence of the second person in posts after death. If continued bonds exist, the usage of words like “you” and “your” should not drop significantly. We will also look at the difference between tenses before and after death. Continued use of present and future tense may indicate continued bonds but this assumption may require further investigation.



References

Continuing Bonds New Understandings of Grief. “About the Book.” Edited by Dennis Klass,Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, 1996.
“Continuing Bonds.” Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. http://www.deathreference.com/Ce-Da/Continuing-Bonds.html

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Research Proposal

Digital Bereavement:
articulating the unheard utterances

"The bitterest tears shed over graves are for
words left unsaid and deeds left undone."
–Harriet Beecher Stowe

GRIEF
Grief is a universal emotion caused by a major loss, especially of a close friend or family member. People handle grief in different ways, but there are certain patterns and phases believed to be common to all cultures. The grieving, or bereavement, process begins with the death of a loved one. This process is typically very emotional and stressful, which can lead to many risks if there is an absence of support. These risks include major changes in social relationships, challenges to faith and beliefs, and various stress-related illnesses. Understanding these patterns and how people cope with grief is important for the prevention of these risks. These risks are elevated when feelings of grief are suppressed and communication with others is limited. Grief is commonly a backstage emotion; it is rare to see people grieve publicly. However, people experience the most relief when this emotion is brought to the forefront. Simply hearing others' stories of grief or sharing one's own stories about a memory of the deceased can constitute as support [1].


GRIEF AND TECHNOLOGY
During the grieving process, support typically comes in the form of religious and cultural practices: funerals, memorial services, etc. Such practices offer people a place to come together for mourning and support from others experiencing the same loss. However, after these ceremonies, this “formal” support is limited—bereaved individuals are less likely to be in the presence of so many people sharing the same grief. The emergence of technology has created new spaces for social support, extending beyond the support traditionally offered in a more formal setting. Email and instant messaging provide simple ways to share logistical information and support among friends and family. Online support groups and memorial pages become sources for social support. Photo albums and videos remembering or honoring the deceased can be easily shared through various technologies. People today undeniably use a wide array of technologies to aid in the bereavement process.


GRIEF AND FACEBOOK
Technology can play another role in the grieving process. In this digital age, we create an online presence that is shaped over the course of many years; Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, blogs and in a sense these become digital blueprints of our lives. Unlike other forms of technology, social networking sites go beyond simply providing spaces for the interaction of grieving friends and family by offering an opportunity to directly communicate with loved ones who have passed away. Posting messages on Facebook pages of the deceased has now become a common practice. The very nature of the Facebook wall and other social network site features provides users with a natural place to write these messages. It is natural to write on the wall of a friend's profile; you would normally leave messages directed towards the user, if the user were still alive.The use of Facebook and other social networking sites for this purpose is a fairly new phenomenon, though Facebook appears to be the only one with a set policy addressing profiles of users who have passed away. In October of 2009, Facebook officially announced the ability to “memorialize” Facebook accounts, a feature which protects the privacy of the deceased while allowing friends and family to continue posting on his or her wall [4].

The uses of technology in the grieving process have been studied, but little is known about the motivation behind posting messages on profile pages of the deceased. This study focuses on analyzing the language of these messages, which will shed light on the motivations of the people posting these messages. Determining the motivation behind these messages can lead to a better understanding of the potential benefits that social networking sites can provide in the grieving process.


ARGUMENTS AND PREDICTIONS
While there are few studies examining the area of social networking and bereavement, there are a plethora of studies dealing with the process of grief and the use of technology in grief, which might explain some of the motivation behind posting messages to the deceased. It is useful to examine Lombard and Selverian’s analysis [5] of technology and bereavement. Lombard and Selverian suggest that there is a need for a telepresence after death, and technology has provided the means for us to evoke a highly vivid and realistic presence of the deceased. Within the framework of this theory, Facebook and other social networking sites simply provide us with an effective way to remember the deceased; through the blueprint and traces left by the deceased, a mourner can use a social networking site to evoke the presence of the deceased.

There are many interactions between the users that Lombard and Selverinan’s theory does not account for. Massimi [6] provides a more in-depth analysis on how bereaved individuals use technology in order to respond to loss. Massimi suggests that, in addition to remembering an individual, technology can be used share memories of the deceased as a group: “Group commemoration is an important aspect of bereavement, and different technologies are used for this purpose.” These social networking sites provide a more effective and intimate way for individuals to share information, photos, and memories of the deceased.

These two theories already provide motivations to use social networking sites in order to cope with the grieving process, but there is a critical factor that both of these theories do not account for. Grieving individuals post messages as if the deceased individual were still alive—this is analogous to visiting the deceased individual in a cemetery and speaking directly to the individual. DeGroot [2] was one of the first to address this issue in her analysis of maintaining the relationships with the deceased via Facebook memorial groups. DeGroot noted that there are several audiences and objectives that people are trying to address when posting to a Facebook group. Some of these audiences include the deceased individual and the members of the memorial group. DeGroot’s research provides a good foundation to understand the motivations behind posting messages to a deceased profile page.

Based on Bruflat's research [1] and Stone's [7] observations, we expect most, if not all, the wall posts to be directed towards to the deceased as if they were still alive. Bruflat's research focused on the role that long-term communication plays in the bereavement process of bereaved families. When sharing stories about the deceased, people chose to communicate about them in the present tense and also chose to use the deceased person's name. By using the name of the deceased and speaking about them in the present tense, grievers communicate that the decease is still a topic that can be discussed, not a topic which should be suppressed during the grieving process. Stone observed, in her article "Grief in the Age of Facebook", that most of the messages posted on the wall of the deceased member's profile page were addressed to the individual directly, not to share memories with others reading the profile. Because of this, we expect that the main motivation for posting on a deceased member's profile page is to help maintain a continuing bond with the deceased individual.


EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
Facebook wall posts of deceased members will be analyzed using a series of text and linguistic analysis. The messages that were posted after the death of the deceased member will be coded based on the 12 categories that DeGroot presents: shock, technology-related references, prose, spirituality, lamentation and questions, phatic communication, memories, continued presence and reminders, updates, appreciation, promises and requests, and eventual reunion. Linguistic features will then be extracted using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program. This text analysis program will count and categorize each word. LIWC's dictionary provides analysis with over 70 linguistic dimensions. All dimensions will be considered in our analysis to allow for potential patterns that we were unaware of; however, we will pay particular attention to relevant categories such as verb tense, death, sadness, negative emotion, positive emotion, sadness, anger, anxiety, friends, and family. Any emergent patterns in linguistic content found during this study will be cross-validated across all the wall posts of the deceased members.



References

Bruflat, R. A. (2007). Gone, but not forgotten: Long-term communication strategies of bereaved families. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 93rd Annual Convention, TBA, Chicago, IL Online. Retrieved March 2, 2010, from All Academic website: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p191217_index.html
DeGroot, J. M. (2009). Reconnecting with the Dead via Facebook: Examining Transcorporeal Communication as a Way to Maintain Relationships. (Doctoral dissertation, Scripps College of Communication, 2009).
Karas, T. (2010, February 5). The psychology of postmortem Facebook. Retrieved February 18, 2010, from Daily Northwestern website: http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/the-weekly/the-psychology-of-postmortem-facebook-1.2139775.
Kelly, M. (2009, October 26). Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook.Retrieved February 18, 2010, from Facebook Blog website: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=163091042130.
Lombard, M., & Selverian, M. E. M. (2008). Telepresence after death. Presence: Teleoper. Virtual Environ., 17(3), 310-325
Massimi, M., & Baecker, R. M. (2010). A Death in the Family: Opportunities for Designing Technologies for the Bereaved. CHI 2010.
Stone, E. (2010, February 28). Grief in the Age of Facebook. Retrieved March 2, 2010, from Chronicle website: http://chronicle.texterity.com/chronicle/20100305b/?pg=20
Statistics: Company Figures. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Research White Paper

Digital Bereavement: Bringing “back stage”
emotion onto an entirely new “front stage”

More than 400 million people use Facebook to stay connected with others, but when one of these people dies, what happens to their profile? In this digital age, we create an online presence that is shaped over the course of many years; Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc. in a sense become digital blueprints of our lives. Not only do these profiles carry on the memory of the deceased, they also become a valuable anchor for a social support network for grieving friends and family. In October of 2009, Facebook officially announced the ability to “memorialize” Facebook accounts, a feature which protects the privacy of the deceased while allowing friends and family to continue posting on his or her wall. Memorialized Facebook pages provide a new way for mourners to cope with grief, reminisce, relay logistics of funeral services, and even communicate with the deceased. Our research will focus specifically on Facebook, but we intend to be able to apply our conclusions to social networking sites in general. Our goal is to inform social networking sites of ways to facilitate digital bereavement through, for example, improved social support networks and more effective website structure/setup.

RESEARCH QUESTION
When Facebook members post on deceased members’ profile walls/memorial groups, what does their language use tell us about their motivation for posting? Emotions and thoughts traditionally reserved for the privacy of diary pages are now being publicly (or somewhat publicly) posted for many to see, even though these posts are often directly addressed to the deceased. Facebook has thus made it possible for mourners to bring their “backstage” emotions of grief and loss to a digital “front stage,” (Goffman) but what are their motivations to do so?

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
Our experiment will include a survey and count and code approach. Survey questions will be based on past similar research and prior questionnaires (i.e. those designed to assess bereavement experience and process). Ideally, we want to target Facebook friends of deceased Facebook users, but decided it was better to survey (via Facebook or email) a wider range of Facebookers. To help increase participation, we will offer an incentive such as a chance to win a gift certificate.

For our other approach, we will be counting and coding based on different categories of wall/memorial group posts. We intend to define motivation categories such as: reminiscence/memories, conversational, longing, disbelief, and logistics. By mapping specific words to our categories, we will be using language to deduce motivation. Furthermore, we will distinguish and analyze potential differences between posts directed to the deceased versus those directed to the social support network at large. The frequency of posts in regards to time (right after the death versus after some time) and the timing of non-immediate posts (whether they tend to fall more on special dates such as birthdays or the anniversary of the death) will also be recorded.

We are contacting Facebook for more information about their decision to include the memorializing feature and for statistics regarding the number of memorialized profiles.

Our research topic is particularly relevant in light of the recent deaths among the Cornell community. As our lives and interactions increasingly become situated online, it is not surprising that online spaces have become a new form of social support.


QUESTIONS
  • Do you know of any resources that can help us define categories of Facebook posts and associate words to categories?
  • Advice on ways to measure emotions such as grief? We've come across questionnaires/scales measuring bereavement/grief from past research, but none that really 100% fits our experiment. Do you have advice on constructing a more effective survey?
  • Have groups in the past had trouble getting enough survey responses? Is there a way that past groups have distributed surveys (especially to the Cornell community) that has been more successful than others? (i.e. email versus Facebook)



Sources

Karas, Tanya. (2010). The psychology of postmortem Facebook. http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/the-weekly/the-psychology-of-postmortem-facebook-1.2139775.
Kelly, Max. (2009). Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=163091042130.
Statistics: Company Figures. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Assignment 3- Online Dating Experiment

Online dating has grown to be a widely used resource for today’s singles. In 2003, 2 out of 5 singles were using an online dating service (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs, 2006). One issue with online dating is the truthfulness of participants’ self-presentations. In 2001, one study showed that over 25% of users misrepresented some aspect of their identity (ibid). Considering the prevalence of both participation and misrepresentation in online dating sites, we believe there is much to be gained from exploring further the influences of misrepresentations in online dating profiles.

Past research has shown people tend to lie less in communication modes that encompass some form of archived record. The presence of some form of archived information is correlated with lower lying rates (Hancock, Thom-Santelli, and Ritchie, 2004). Expanding upon this idea, we propose an experiment that would explore how the availability of records, in this case a dating profile, might be influential on one's inclination to misrepresent oneself. We hypothesize that users would misrepresent themselves less if they believed others would be viewing their profile (archived information) frequently throughout their interactions.

For this experiment, we would create an online dating service with two different layouts to alter a medium variable. In the first condition, the limited access condition, people could browse others’ profiles freely at first. Then, in order to show interest in someone, they would click something which would bring them to a screen where they could create a message to send to the person of interest. From that point on, clicking on the person and/or profile of interest would bring the user directly to the message string and they would no longer be able to access the other's profile (some users may even suspect this to be an oversight in the functionality of the dating website). In the second condition, the imposed information condition, users again would be able to browse potential mates’ profiles freely and again would click something to show their interest which would begin a string of messages between the two users of the dating site. In this condition, whenever the user wrote messages in the message string, they would be forced to face the profile information as the profile would be above the text box in the message writing screen (much like the way facebook wall text boxes are nested among information about a person).

In order to operationalize the level of a participants' misrepresentation in his/her profile, we would survey those who met face to face with the participant as it would be very difficult to create an objective, generalizable coding scheme for gauging the accuracy of a users' profile. It also measures misrepresentation according to Clark's notion of "what the speaker is to be taken to mean," what is ultimately important in dating profiles. We would ask the survey-taker about how much the other misrepresented subjective qualities about him/herself such as his/her appreciation of humor or love of the outdoors, giving them a copy of their partner's profile to look at while they completed the survey. One factor we must control is how much increased exposure to another’s profile influenced perception. For example, if someone was continually reminded that her partner considered himself ambitious, she may consider him more or less ambitious than if she had only seen this information once. To control for this, we would look at all combinations of pairs, limited access users who dated other limited access users, limited access users who dated imposed information users, and imposed information users who dated other imposed information users. The participants would not know that others had a different layout than their own, so they would not factor this in to their profile creation. If there were enough data that only a subset was needed for significant results, we would use the CDMA data sampling technique of sampling by individual and surveying all those who interacted with individuals within the subset. We hypothesize that limited access users would be rated as misrepresenting themselves far more than the imposed information users.


*Note: We recognize it would be extremely difficult to actually create an online dating service for the purpose of an experiment, but you said our experiment didn’t have to be entirely feasible. A more realistic experiment might involve studying the level of misrepresentation between several preexisting dating sites which allow different levels of accessibility to user profiles.


Sources

Ellison, N., Heino, R., & Gibbs, J. (2006). Managing impressions online: Self-presentation processes in the online dating environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 2. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/ellison.html

Hancock, J., Thom-Santelli, J., & Ritchie, T. (2004). Deception and design: The impact of communication technology on lying behavior. In E. Dykstra-Erickson & M. Tscheligi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 129-134). New York: ACM.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Status Analysis

In regards to our semantic analysis, our high status emails contained an overall feeling of excitement, topics about education, and an “expected” quality. This is most likely due to the fact that our high status emails were to individuals regarding job searches, and perhaps emails to strangers as well. The words that came up in our high status emails frequently, were: “-ing” words, or action verbs, “was” and “am”. These results are concordant with our semantic analysis results as well. For the most part, I believe when we were crafting our high status emails, we wanted to create a positive perception of ourselves when addressing these high status individuals. Enthusiasm, through the use of “-ing” verbs can help to create a feeling of excitement and interest in either the potential job, mentor, or advice the student is seeking from the high status individual. By using words such as “was” and “am” we are describing ourselves and activities to the high status individual. It also makes sense that these words would be seen less in the low status emails because most communications with low status people are usually to delegate tasks or to maintain a relationship. The student also might not have met the high status individual yet. This could shape the tone and content of the email to include background about themselves in the emails, which would help explain the “am” words as well as the “expected” tone and education topics that were mentioned.

On the other hand, our low status emails covered topics of personal belongings, army/warfare, and people: male and female. Words like “you” were used frequently, and single letters of the alphabet were used more frequently in low status emails. The students who crafted the low status emails might have served as an authority figure over the low status individual. As explained before, "you" words were probably used more to help with the delegations of tasks. This could explain the frequency of the “you” words, which are can be commanding and authoritative. Another take on the frequency of “you” could be the fact that individuals crafting low status emails are more interested in having a rapport and “you” is more conversational. Emails written to lower status individuals might be more playful, and less serious, therefore topics about belongings and gossip (people: male/female) might be mentioned more than they would be in a more serious, high status email. It is interesting to note that weapons came up in our semantic analysis, and when I looked through our emails, I couldn’t find anything that matched up, until I realized Christine is a Film major and used the word “shoot” and “shooting” frequently. This was probably directed towards underclassmen and has nothing to do with weapons, but it is a semantic misunderstanding of her use of “shooting”.

Euphemism Coding

Euphemism Definition:
As defined by Wikipedia, a euphemism is a substitution of an agreeable or less offensive expression in place of one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant to the receiver, or to make it less troublesome for the speaker, as in the case of doublespeak. Typically, these are made of words or expressions that are taboo in normal social settings.


Coding Instructions:
1. Disregard salutation.
2. Unitize emails into separate ideas: Each sentence is a separate idea. Commas separate ideas when they separate independent clauses. Parentheses are also a separate idea when they contain an independent clause.
3. Disregard closings that are not indepedent clauses (i.e. “regards”, “best,” etc.)
4. Code each unit for euphemisms (1 = contains at least one euphemism, 0 = no euphemism)


Reliability:
The results were 99.5% reliable.


Euphemism Examples:
1. I don't think we'll have to worry about it being too spring break-like.
2. KD is not covering dinner.


Confusion Matrix:

No Euphemism(0)Euphemism(1)
No Euphmism(0)2120
Euphemism(1)13

Testing Testing

Is this thing on? Just checking.