Advice-seeking and advice-giving strategies of Malaysian women in an online support forum for IVF / Pung Wun Chiew
Despite the increasing prominence of the Internet for a variety of social purposes, research on how advice is sought and given online is still lacking, especially in context where the strategies are tied to communities of a certain culture and gender. This study aimed to investigate the advice-se...
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Format: | Thesis |
Published: |
2017
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Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/7955/2/All.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/7955/9/pung.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/7955/ |
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Summary: | Despite the increasing prominence of the Internet for a variety of social purposes,
research on how advice is sought and given online is still lacking, especially in context
where the strategies are tied to communities of a certain culture and gender. This study
aimed to investigate the advice-seeking strategies, the advice-giving strategies, and the
influence of culture when advice is solicited and given online among women in a
Malaysian online forum on in-vitro fertilization (IVF). Six months of IVF-related
messages posted in a local online forum were analyzed, in which 251 were adviceseeking
messages, and 369 were advice-giving messages. The analysis took on a largely
qualitative approach with some quantitative aspect of counting, incorporating Locher’s
(2006) system of coding messages, Kouper's (2010) typology of advice-seeking and
advice-giving patterns, Ruble's (2011) message-content analysis method, and
Goldsmith's (2004) model of advice. The findings revealed question-asking as the most
frequently utilized strategy of seeking advice, followed by problem-description, and
lastly, the least used advice-seeking strategy was to request for it explicitly. However,
offering or giving advice directly ranked top as the most preferred advice-giving
strategy. This was followed by the advice-giving strategies of describing one's own
experiences, giving indirect advice, providing general information, referring the
message-recipient to another advice source, and narrating other people's experiences. It
was also found that the content of the advice-seeking messages was mostly specific to
the advice-seeker's problem, with many instances of mitigation and expressions of the
advice-seeker's distress. On the other hand, the advice-giving messages showed the
advice-givers' tendency to bond with the advice-recipients besides the use of hedging
devices to downtone the advice's impositional level. Interaction in the online forum was
also governed by the fact that the communication medium was computer-mediated
communication (CMC), and the presumption that the forum members were Malaysian women, and subsequently, the topic under discussion was culturally taboo. Thus,
although there was freer self-expression by the participants, the manner in which they
interacted still showed their interests to form close relationships, and in ways that were
culturally appropriate. As such, despite the anonymity afforded by CMC, several
aspects of the interaction still showed cultural influence at both message-content and
discourse levels. |
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