Conversations among online community members as a form of everyday, unconstrained, flexible, and spontaneous communication are important for developing a sense of community, sustainability of online communities, construction of identity, public sphere, and for creating and maintaining offline taken-for-granted basic structures of everyday life. While the lack of qualities of online conversations in online communities is often discussed and researched, we argue that its positive sides should also be conceptualized and become the subject of quantitative empirical research. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept and scale of perceived quality of online conversations and inspect the psychometric properties of the proposed scale in terms of content and convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity and reliability. The paper presents a five-factor structure of the quality of conversation scale, which is tested for its quality on a sample of 1,276 online community participants. Confirmatory factor analysis supports the proposed multidimensional structure, while correlational and regression analyses demonstrate good levels of convergent, discriminant and criterion validity. The paper suggests several refinements of the measurement instrument, and concludes with the usefulness of the introduced scale for the research and understanding of the online community phenomenon.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32641117
The role of online communities in empowerment has received only limited attention in theory-based empirical research, with the focus predominantly on individual empowerment of people in online support groups. This article proposes that to analyze the empowering opportunities of online communities, both individual and collective dimensions of empowerment need to be taken into account, considering the suggestion that the relationship between the two can be an opposing one. The empowerment theory developed in community psychology allows the analysis of empowerment outcomes in the realm of online communities on the psychological level; however, to understand the conditions of congruency between individual and collective empowerment, we introduce the mechanism of communicative interaction. Hypotheses deduced from empowerment theory are contested with the hypotheses of our complementary approach and tested on a convenience sample of online community members. Results indicate that the psychosocial understanding of empowerment processes in the field of community psychology might get new insights by considering a communication perspective for such processes.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32683357
The aim of this paper was to analyse youth political participation trends. We referred to various secondary data, and data on Slovenia was paralleled with other European countries. The data show that the interest in politics and current affairs of their own country and city/region is lower among young people in Slovenia than the average among young people in the EU15. Leading politicians and political parties were already in 2000 among young people the least trusted institutions, right behind the EU and the President of the country. In addition, less confidence in politics and a greater sense of powerlessness in relation to established institutionalised politics continue even in a negative perception of one’s own power for impact on social change in general. However, data for Slovenia show that political and, in particular, the wider social engagement among young people (unlike the conventional politics) has not entirely died away. It rather retreated from the classical institutions and engagement towards tailored, predominantly electronically transmitted practices, which are of predominantly of socio-cultural and political nature, directly related to the lifestyles of young people.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33162077