查看文章

Researchers using forums and online focus groups need to ensure they are safe and need tools to make best use of the data. We explored the use of metrics that would allow better forum management and more effective analysis of participant contributions.

To report retrospectively calculated metrics from self-harm discussion forums and to assess whether metrics add to other methods such as discourse analysis. We asked (1) which metrics are most useful to compare and manage forums, and (2) how metrics can be used to identify the participative stances of members to help manage discussion forums.

We studied the use of metrics in discussion forums on self-harm. SharpTalk comprised five discussion forums, all using the same software but with different forum compositions. SharpTalk forums were similar to most moderated forums but combined support and general social chat with online focus groups discussing issues on self-harm. Routinely recorded time-stamp data were used to derive metrics of episodes, time online, pages read, and postings. We compared metrics from the forums with views from discussion threads and from moderators. We identified patterns of participants’ online behavior by plotting scattergrams and identifying outliers and clusters within different metrics.

In comparing forums, important metrics seem to be number of participants, number of active participants, total time of all participants logged on in each 24 hours, and total number of …