[Air-l] Correction for Paper: Internet and Social Capital

[Anabel Quan Haase]

  Dear AoIR members: 

  Important Correction re Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan Haase, Keith
  Hampton and James Witte, "Does the Internet Increase, Decrease, or
  Supplement Social Capital? Social Networks, Participation, and
  Community Commitment." _American Behavioral Scientist_, 45, 3
  (November 2001): 437-56. Please note that this paper was presented
at     The AOIR INTERConnections 2. Conference [Session # 434: Social
Capital]

  We regret that one set of results (about Community Commitment) 
  in this paper misinterpreted an important association. 
  We stated in this paper (Table 6 and pages 449-50) that
  the greater the use of the Internet, the Lower the Sense of Online
  Community. However, this General Sense of Online Community variable,
  and the two other variables presented in Table 6 (Sense of Community
  with Family Online, Sense of Alienation Online) were coded with higher
  sense of community as the lowest value. Thus, the negative regression
  coefficients reported in Table 6 should have their signs reversed.
  Substantively, this means that the More the Internet is used, the
  Greater the Sense of Online Community. The other two "Sense" variables
  are also positively, but very slightly, associated with the frequency
  of Internet use. These revised findings  mean that the interpretation
of
  results on pages 449-50 is inoperative. A corrected version of
these      findings will be posted soon to
www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman, and a     revised and expanded chapter
will appear in Barry Wellman and Caroline
  Haythornthwaite, eds., _The Internet in Everyday Life_ (Oxford:
  Blackwell, 2002).    

Sincerely, 
Anabel Quan Haase
Faculty of Information Studies,
University of Toronto
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