ASSIGNMENT 2 (SUMMARY)
TITLE OF ARTICLE
Why do women write personal blogs? Satisfying needs for self-disclosure and affiliation tell part of the story
AUTHOR
Gina Masullo Chen
JOURNAL
Computer in Human Behaviour
URL
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563211001798#
PURPOSE
To see how Psychological motivation influences women to blog.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Men and women have different motivation in writing a blog. Earlier researchers have focused on men then this research will be focused on women only and their psychological motivation in writing a blog and this research will focus only in personal blogging
RESEARCH QUESTION
1) What are the Psychological needs that driven women to blog especially for those with personal blog?
SAMPLE
An individual woman blogger who have their own personal blog and been updated recently. The bloggers were chosen randomly as the sample was taken by selecting every 14th blogger in BlogHer lists and 5th blogger from other lists. Most of the bloggers are college-educated. In addition to that, most of the respondents are white and the rest are Asian, Pan Islanders, Black or African American, and Hispanic. The total of 413 women bloggers answered the questionnaire online and respondents who do not answer majority of the question were removed from the analysis. So, the total of respondents is 312.
METHODOLOGY
Participants and Instruments
Firstly, a total of 1496 blogs were chosen through the women’s blog directories which are BlogHer, Blackwomenblogs.com, blogadera.com, a Latina blog site, Blogsbywomen.org. Since there is single directory that listed all women bloggers around the world, BlogHer was taken as the main population as it offers the biggest number of women’s blogger worldwide. Group blogs, bloggers who identified themselves as men, are removed because this research focuses on individual, female bloggers. The blogs are majority in English and other language blogs are excludes to make it coherent. The blog must also update within two month. Then, the bloggers were contacted through email to answer a set of 43 survey questions. A total of 413 bloggers answered the questionnaire but the incomplete questionnaires were removed from the analysis and the total of questionnaire to be analyzed is 312. The survey questions were analyzed based on 3 hypotheses which are the need of self-disclosure and its relationship with expressing voice, need of affiliation and its relationship with connection with others and lastly, need for achievement and its relationship with gain influence in the blogosphere.
FINDINGS
The need for self-disclosure, need for affiliation and time spent blogging are all interrelated to the psychological motivation of blogging among women. But the data shows that the hypotheses of women with high need to affiliate as a way of to communicate with others and the high need of achievement as an influence in the blogosphere is not so true. The need for affiliation and achievement are only the secondary need for blogging among women bloggers. These two hypotheses which are need for affiliation and need for achievement are only applicable for bloggers who have high traffic and followers. So, time spent for blogging is another important factor to gain influence in the blogosphere and to communicate with others. In short, this research has proven that women with personal blog are just intended to express their voice and the other factor like need for new friends and achievement like followers are just the merit they get for this activity.
COMMENTS
This research has been focusing on women and their Psychological need to do personal blogging. We agreed that this blog somehow managed to proven their first hypothesis as women need to write for self-disclosure. The society expected women to be more polite compare to men yet they are unable to voice their needs and through blogging they can express their opinion and knowledge without being judge by the society. Spoken and written forms of communications are different. Women can be loud in their writing but not in spoken form. As time changes, Computer- mediated communication (CMC) has given ways for women to express their voice through the social media, blog and forum much more freely.
