Connecting developmental constructions to the internet: identity presentation and sexual exploration in online teen chat rooms

The authors examined the online construction of identity and sexuality in a large sample of conversations from monitored and unmonitored teen chat rooms. More than half of the 583 participants (identified by a distinct screen name) communicated identity information, most frequently gender. In this way, participants compensated for the text-based chat environment by providing information about themselves that would be visible and obvious in face-to-face communication. Sexual themes constituted 5% of all utterances (1 sexual comment per minute); bad or obscene language constituted 3% of the sample (1 obscenity every 2 minutes). Participants who self-identified as female produced more implicit sexual communication, participants who self-identified as male produced more explicit sexual communication. The protected environment of monitored chat (hosts who enforce basic behavioral rules) contained an environment with less explicit sexuality and fewer obscenities than the freer environment of unmonitored chat. These differences were attributable both to the monitoring process itself and to the differing populations attracted to each type of chat room (monitored: more participants self-identified as younger and female; unmonitored: more participants self-identified as older and male).     

"Any girls want to chat press 911": partner selection in monitored and unmonitored teen chat rooms.

We examined the search for partners by participants in two teen chat services having different ecologies. Over 12,000 utterances from monitored and unmonitored chat rooms were analyzed to assess online partner selection attempts and to see how such attempts may be influenced by the presence of an adult monitor. We found that the search for partners is ubiquitous in adolescents' online haunts, just as it is in their offline lives, and approximately two requests for a partner occur each minute. Although partner selection appears to be an important activity in online teen chat rooms, there are differences in frequency and format (e.g., the use of numerals, sexualized requests) as a function of participants' age and gender, and chat room ecology (monitored vs. unmonitored).     

Profiling of Participants in Chat Conversations Using Creativity-Based Heuristics

This article proposes a new fully automated method for identifying creativity that is manifested in a divergent task. The task is represented by chat conversations in small groups, each group having to debate on the same topics, with the purpose of better understanding the discussed concepts. The chat conversations were created by undergraduate students in computer science studying human-computer interaction in several consecutive years. From this corpus of conversations, the chats from a single year were selected for analysis. These 25 chats contained 8,798 utterance, made of 82,176 word appearances with a vocabulary size of 5,948 distinct words. By analyzing the resulted dataset of chat conversations, the creative ideas expressed by participants are automatically identified and extracted. The application is a first step in supporting creativity in online group discussions by highlighting the novel concepts present in conversations (new ideas) and also by identifying topics that could have become important, but they were forgotten during the debates (lost ideas). Once the ideas are identified, the system tries to also capture their developments, the reactions they attract and the conclusions that are drawn based on them. Because group constituency might influence the level of creative discourse within a conversation, the typology of each participant to the conversation is evaluated, starting from the analysis of the ideas already discovered, along with the utterances labeled as developments, reactions and conclusions.     

Cohesion network analysis of CSCL participation

The broad use of computer-supported collaborative-learning (CSCL) environments (e.g., instant messenger–chats, forums, blogs in online communities, and massive open online courses) calls for automated tools to support tutors in the time-consuming process of analyzing collaborative conversations. In this article, the authors propose and validate the cohesion network analysis (CNA) model, housed within the ReaderBench platform. CNA, grounded in theories of cohesion, dialogism, and polyphony, is similar to social network analysis (SNA), but it also considers text content and discourse structure and, uniquely, uses automated cohesion indices to generate the underlying discourse representation. Thus, CNA enhances the power of SNA by explicitly considering semantic cohesion while modeling interactions between participants. The primary purpose of this article is to describe CNA analysis and to provide a proof of concept, by using ten chat conversations in which multiple participants debated the advantages of CSCL technologies. Each participant’s contributions were human-scored on the basis of their relevance in terms of covering the central concepts of the conversation. SNA metrics, applied to the CNA sociogram, were then used to assess the quality of each member’s degree of participation. The results revealed that the CNA indices were strongly correlated to the human evaluations of the conversations. Furthermore, a stepwise regression analysis indicated that the CNA indices collectively predicted 54% of the variance in the human ratings of participation. The results provide promising support for the use of automated computational assessments of collaborative participation and of individuals’ degrees of active involvement in CSCL environments.     

Peer counseling in an online chat service: a content analysis of social support

In a recently launched one-on-one chat service for young people with psychosocial problems, young peer volunteers (ages 16-23) have a leading role in the conversations, comparable to the role of counselors in web-based and telephone-based child help-line services. A content analysis of the chat conversations showed that the contribution of the peer counselors in the confidential chat sessions satisfied the various quality criteria of the service. Moreover, the peer counselors offered the young people who visited the site varied types of social support. The variety of types of social support appeared a stronger predictor of the quality ratings than the length of the conversation or the quantity (instead of variety) of social support, which emphasizes the importance of multidimensional social support in online conversations.     

Factors related to perceived helpfulness in supporting highly distressed individuals through an online support chat.

The purpose of the study was to examine the contribution made by dimensions of session-impact factors (depth and smoothness), end-of-session factors of client's mood (positivity and emotional arousal), and several textual variables (use of positive and negative emotional words; helper's and client's writing lengths) to perceived helpfulness of emotional support conversations carried on by trained, paraprofessional helpers through an Internet chat with highly distressed individuals. Two studies were conducted at an Israeli, exclusively online emotional support service for suicidal and highly distressed people who have undergone various negative experiences (SAHAR). Study 1 compared 40 chat conversations deliberately indicated by clients as having been helpful at the termination stage of session with 40 other conversations, using expert judgments of session-impact factors, as well as objective word counts for textual variables. Study 2 examined correlations between helpers' evaluation of the sessions' helpfulness to clients in 60 (other) chat support conversations and session-impact factors and textual variables. The findings of Study 1 showed that all four impact factors significantly differentiated between helpful and other conversations, while textual variables did not. In Study 2, the results showed that all four session-impact factors positively correlated with session helpfulness, yielding multiple R = 0.54, as well as the length of helper's and client's writing. The implications of these studies are similar to offline counseling sessions: deep, smooth conversations that yield positive responses and arouse clients' emotions in online support are more helpful than shallow, bumping conversations that leave clients emotionally indifferent. Longer writing, by both helpers and clients, seems to be an important factor, as well.     

Inadvertent exposure to pornography on the Internet: Implications of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks for child development and families

A request from the National Academies to prepare a presentation for a Workshop on Non-Technical Strategies to Protect Youth from Inappropriate Material on the Internet occurred before much was known about children, youth, and the Internet. The author's strategy was to investigate websites that cater to children and adolescents. The developmental issue of consumer socialization was raised by a visit to the Disney website. In contrast, the developmental issues of sexuality, aggression, and intergroup relations were raised by visits to chat rooms hosted by two different Internet Web portals. Examination of existing research literature, in conjunction with visits to the websites, led to the following conclusions: (1) Many parents are aware of the problems of making children the targets of commerce; however, they are quite unaware of the kind of social and cultural worlds young people are creating online. (2) Children and adolescents are not simply the targets of adult Internet creations; they are active participants in creating their own cybercultures, for example, in teen chat rooms. (3) The nature and norms of these cultures can be very much influenced by adult rules, regulations, and participatory monitoring. (4) The important developmental issues raised by this new medium are not unique to the Internet. For example, each psychosocial phenomenon from consumerism to sexuality to aggression has important manifestations in the culture at large.     

Coherence and coreference

Coherence in conversations and in texts can be partially characterized by a set of coherence relations, motivated ultimately by the speaker's or writer's need to be understood. In this paper, formal definitions are given for several coherence relations, based on the operations of an inference system; that is, the relations between successive portions of a discourse are characterized in terms of the inferences that can be drawn from each. In analyzing a discourse, it is frequently the case that we would recognize it as coherent, in that it would satisfy the formal definition of some coherence relation, if only we could assume certain noun phrases to be coreferential. In such cases, we will simply assume the identity of the entities referred to, in what might be called a “petty conversational implicature,” thereby solving the coherence and coreference problems simultaneously. Three examples of different kinds of reference problems are presented. In each, it is shown how the coherence of the discourse can be recognized, and how the reference problems are solved, almost as a by-product, by means of these petty conversational implicatures.     

Coherency in children's discourse

We provide evidence that the capacity of young children to engage in social interaction exceeds that suggested by Piaget (1926). Rather than being collective monologues, the conversations between the subjects of this study (twin boys) were dialogues: the children attended to one another's utterances and provided relevant responses. This was observed for conversations which were referentially based as well as for sound play exchanges. This is not to say that the children experienced no difficulty in sustaining cooperative discourse. It could take a speaker several turns to secure the attention of the coconversationalist and establish a discourse topic.     

Global coherence in younger and older adults: Influence of cognitive processes and discourse type

The purpose of the present research was to examine the influence of cognitive processes on discourse global coherence ability measured across different discourse tasks and collected from younger (n = 40; 20–39 years) and older (n = 40; 70–87 years) cognitively healthy adults. Study participants produced oral language samples in response to five commonly used discourse elicitation tasks and they were analyzed for maintenance of global coherence. Participants also completed memory and attention measures. Group differences on the global coherence scale were found for only one type of discourse—recounts. Across discourse elicitation tasks the lowest global coherence scores were found for recounts compared to the other discourse elicitation tasks. The influence of cognitive processes on maintenance of global coherence differed for the two age groups. For the younger group, there were no observed significant relationships. For the older group, cognitive measures were related to global coherence of stories and procedures.     

Sequentiality of speech acts in conversational structure

One aspect of the phenomenon of coherence in conversational discourse was addressed in the present study: sequentiality of speech acts. Several models of discourse structure have postulated sequencing rules between speech acts in conversations, but these efforts have been hampered by the lack of an efficient empirical method that can characterize a large body of language data. The lag sequential technique is proposed here as a tool that can be used to abstract a grammar of speech act contingency from spoken discourse. Derived patterns of discourse between female adults and preschool children confirmed expectations that most discourse is based upon three fundamental speech act pairings: question-answer, statement-reply, and directive-acknowledgment. It was also found that interlocutor differences in status, knowledge, and conversational ability affected the structure of the discourse in predictable ways.     

Interpersonal Perception in Internet Chat Rooms

Accurate personality judgments are important for successful interpersonal interactions. Because millions of people use the Internet everyday to create and maintain interpersonal relationships, the current study investigated interpersonal perception in Internet chat rooms. Participants were 156 undergraduate students who interacted in chat rooms for 15 min either one-on-one or in groups of six. Using the Social Relations Model (Kenny, 1994), it was found that in one-on-one interactions, judges were able to achieve consensus for the targets' traits of extraversion, agreeableness, and openness. For extraversion and openness, this agreement corresponded with targets' self-perceptions. Unlike research using face-to-face interactions, consensus was highest and assimilation was lowest when participants interacted one-on-one. Judges in group interactions tended to like the targets less and viewed them less favorably across all personality traits than did judges in one-on-one interactions. Targets' self-reported personality had little predictive power in determining who was liked in Internet chat rooms. However, targets' prior chat room experience was consistently found to be a moderate predictor of likability.     

Haven't we met somewhere before? The effects of a brief internet introduction on social anxiety in a subsequent face to face interaction

Social anxiety occurs in a range of social situations, the salience of which is influenced by prevailing modes of social contact. The emergence of computer mediated communication (CMC), buoyed by the recent explosion of social networks, has changed the way many people make and maintain social contacts. We randomly assigned 30 socially anxious and 30 low social anxiety participants to a brief internet chat introduction or a control internet surfing condition followed by a standardized face to face (FTF) interaction. We hypothesized that for socially anxious participants the chat introduction would reduce anxiety of and preference to avoid the subsequent FTF interaction. Results supported hypotheses for most indices. Findings suggest that, at least for the common situation in which internet chat precedes FTF interaction with the same person, such contact may reduce social anxiety. It is not known whether this decrease would generalize to FTF contact in other contexts. It is suggested that CMC might be construed as a particularly useful form of safety behavior that may help in the allocation of attentional resources to process new information relevant for disconfirmation of negative beliefs maintaining social anxiety. Potential clinical implications are discussed.     

A procedure for studying online conversational processing using a chat bot

This article reports the development of a tool for examining the social and cognitive processes of people involved in a conversational interaction. Research on how people process utterances while they are actually engaged in an interaction has been extremely rare. To that end, we have developed a conversational bot (computer program designed to mimic human communication) with which participants can chat in a format similar to instant messaging. This program allows for the recording of comprehension speed, and it can be interfaced with secondary tasks (e.g., lexical decisions) in order to examine online conversational processing. Additional research possibilities with this program are discussed.