8 - "But what if I don't want kids?"

Milan Allen (blue)
Soyong Lee (green)
Ellis Weng (brown)

We selected and analyzed twenty messaged from a thread on alt.support.childfree under Google groups - a “childless by choice” support forum - according to a scheme devised by Braithwaite et al. We focused on the responses following a post written by “Annie” who was debating whether or not to have a child and remain single, and numerically coded them according to six factors:

• Information: the exchange of advice or knowledge of some kind.
• Tangible assistance: aid offered in a very specific way, such as loaned money.
• Esteem support: relief of blame, affirmation/validation of the user’s situation.
• Network support: referral to others that can provide additional support.
• Emotional support: sympathy, empathy, and encouragement.
• Humor: aspect of a message intended to entertain (not part of the original study but shown below).



Our results ranked information highest (60% of the messages), then emotional support, and humor (both 55%), esteem support (40%) and lastly, network support (15%).We found no tangible assistance. Our results compliment Braithwaite’s study, since she found that information, emotional, and esteem support occur with the highest degree of frequency and tangible assistance tends to occur the least; however, her study yielded the highest in the emotional support category instead of information. The difference in the specific numbers can possibly be attributed to a difference in the central focus of the support forums analyzed. Braithwaite et al. focused on Usenet groups for individuals with physical disabilities; living with physical limitations is not uncommon and there is a wealth of information and resources available online. Remaining “childfree,” however, is more of a social issue and therefore the content and tone of each message was radically different. Most of the members are female who dislike children in general, and feel pressured by society to conform to what they perceive as a “mandatory parenting” standard. The posters always sought to inform, but had very set opinions on the subject so they did less supporting and more arguing than was probably intended. Braithwaite didn’t code for humor, but recognized its importance within the groups in her experiment. A couple of the messages we analyzed were sarcastic and spontaneous one-liners posted solely with the intent to amuse, often at another group member’s expense. The absolute lack of tangible assistance is unsurprising given the subject matter and the fact that online spaces do not usually lend themselves to this type of support.

We also found our inter-rated reliability to be 71%, which is slightly above what could be considered “chance” agreement but questionable in terms of statistical significance. We examined this further in an attempt to figure out why our agreement was so low. Working in a group of three caused our inter-rater reliability to be relatively lower than a group of two. In our situation, all three of us had to come to a general consensus to be able to mark “agree.” After analyzing our results, we found that our coding was affected by many factors: our own biases, the type of support, and the length of the message. Our own biases and our individual personalities caused us to judge the message differently. For example, Milan and Ellis found twice as many posts to be humorous because their sense of humor tends to be more sarcastic. The definition of humor can also cause differences in coding because humor is subjective; something can be funny to one person but not to another person. The same goes for information in our topic. What exactly qualifies as “information” when it comes to deciding whether or not to have a child? Because of these vague definitions, humor and information were the least agreed on between the three of us.

Another factor that we found to play a large role in our coding disagreement was the length of a post.



Originally, we noticed that we agreed more when the post was very lengthy. We thought that there might be a direct correlation between agreeability and the length of a post. After counting every word in each of the post and the number of supports that we agreed on in each of the posts, we found that there is not a direct correlation. Instead, we found that it was harder to code posts that were between 20-180 words. Shorter posts, less than 20 words, were actually really easy to code because they usually contained no support whatsoever. The length of a message and the vagueness of a definition of support both played roles in determining our agreeability.

Walther & Boyd's Social Support Theory found four dimensions of attraction involved in online support behavior which were clearly identifiable in our analysis:

• Social distance: the nature of the internet allows for a wide-range of individuals with varying opinions and levels of expertise to interact. The general consensus is that remaining childfree is not something most people would be comfortable discussing with their “breeder” acquaintances since the latter would not be able to understand their position.

• Anonymity: the original poster and those that replied felt comfortable airing their opinions, concerns, and personal anecdotes without fear of negative social consequences due to the relative anonymity provided in online spaces. The affects of anonymity on self-disclosure is a recurrent theme in online social interaction; an increase of the former invariably leads to an increase in the latter. Given that, it can be surmised that the members considered themselves to be mostly anonymous considering they often referenced their work or personal lives.

• Interaction management: Users are able to take as much time as they require to script and edit their responses in CmC which allows for a greater degree of control over what they choose to express. This is also one of the benefits of an online support forum since in FtF interactions one usually doesn’t have as much time to compose their thoughts and words before speaking. Google groups are unique in the sense that they offer “timed” messages – a poster can choose the amount of time that will lapse before their message is automatically deleted from the server. In this way, users control how long others have access to their responses and information (this also ties into anonymity).

• Access: threads are always accessible and users are free to create new ones/reply to old ones whenever they feel it necessary.