[Air-l] qualitative analysis of discussion board postings

[Ulrike Pfeil]

Dear All
I am currently starting my PhD in the area of CMC. I am especially interested in the phenomenon of empathy and how it manifests in online communication. In my current study, I investigate message postings from a (quite emotional) discussion board and through grounded theory came up with a detailed categorisation scheme of the content. Apart from the basic statistics with the codings, I would like to relate the patterns I found in the online discussion board to the phenomenon of empathy in offline communication. However, I struggle with the approach I should take. I have read about different kinds of qualitative analysis (like thematic analysis, discourse analysis and some parts of content analysis...) but I am not sure how exactly to go about it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of analysis (relation of coding results to general characteristics of a phenomenon like empathy)  or can recommend literature that might help me? It would not be a problem to write about it but I am searching for a more "prescribed procedure". Does anybody know of similar studies? I also thought about using word frequencies and concordances for the analysis - does anybody have any recommendation concerning this? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Kind regards,
Ulrike
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