Grooming analysis modeling the social interactions of online discussion groups

Abstract

This chapter looks into different ways of analyzing and modeling the time dependent development of social interactions between members in online discussion groups. Social grooming is an activity in which individuals bond and reinforce social structures. To grooming someone can be for instance to mention someones name in a discussion or to cite something said by that person. The number of grooms received by a group member can be analyzed and used as an indicator of the social status in the group. By performing grooming analysis it is possible to attain information about how the relative status of the group members changes over time. The data in this study is taken from two different international online discussion groups. A validation showed that the estimate of status based on the grooming analysis showed remarkable correspondence with the collective status ranking performed by a group of independent evaluators. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.