Journal
SOCIOLOGY OF HEALTH & ILLNESS
Volume 27, Issue 7, Pages 920-943Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9566.2005.00464.x
Keywords
social capital; social support; mothers; internet
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Do virtual communities in cyberspace foster social capital and social support? Using participant observation and discourse analysis, we examine a mothering board on a parent's website and investigate whether social capital was present, and if so, how it was developed and used. We find three main types of communication emerge from our analysis: emotional support, instrumental support - both formal and informal, and community building/protection, all of which contribute to the creation and maintenance of social capital. Additionally, using sampling with replacement, we created a final data set of 180 mothers and report descriptive statistics to identify characteristics of those on the board.
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