The Study: Rationale, Data and Methods

This chapter begins by elucidating the significance of the study and reviewing prior research on social support in online self-help groups. Then the chapter presents the data set collected for the following four chapters of discourse studies in the communication of social support in online self-help groups for anxiety and depression (OSGADs), including selection criteria of online self-help groups, data size, data collection criteria, data filtering, and corpus compilation. More importantly, research ethics regarding the study of online conversations will be discussed. The ethical considerations in the presenting studies are explained, such as anonymity of user names, limited number of data demonstrations, elimination of user identity information, and avoidance of using private messages.