Parents of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have special needs about health information related to children. This research aims to understand how parents of children with ASD in China seek information in information grounds. We conducted field observations at a treatment and rehabilitation center, and interviewed 16 Chinese parents of children with ASD whose children participated in the therapy classes at this center. Results derived from qualitative coding and analysis suggest that: (1) parents' information needs evolve around improving their children's living skills, social connections are important information sources for them. (2) Parents' information grounds are closely related to their everyday life of looking after the children, such as classes and activities. Main topics of information sharing and exchange at such places include experiences of raising children with special needs, children's health status, and other child‐bearing topics. (3) Factors influencing parents' information behavior in the information grounds include homogeneity, familiarity, focal activity, reward expectation, and so on. (4) Parents benefit from such information grounds to gain useful information, emotional support, and social connections. These findings provide insights on better understanding the unique needs of parents with ASD children.
Emojis have become more and more popular in text-based online communication to express emotions. This indicates a potential to utilize emojis in sentiment analysis and emotion measurements. However, many factors could affect people’s emoji usage and need to be examined. Among them, age, gender, and relationship types may result in different interpretations of the same emoji due to the ambiguity of the iconic expression. In this paper, we aim to explore how these factors may affect the frequency, type, and sentiment of people’s emoji usage in communications. After analyzing 6,821 Wechat chatting messages from 158 participants, we found people between 26–35 had lowest frequency of emoji usage; younger and elder groups showed different sentiment levels for the same emojis; people chose emoji types based on relationships. These findings shed light on how people use emojis as a communication tool.
Sensemaking could be carried out individually or collaboratively. Collaborative sensemaking is a process where a group of people seek or create a shared representation collaboratively to accomplish a shared task. We conduct content analysis on 12 sections (611 minutes of audio recordings) from 6 small discussion groups relating to 2 topics in information organization. We identified 13 types of collaborative sensemaking activities and categorized them into content-related and process-related activities. We also describe 2 typical sensemaking sequences in these discussion groups. The results may advance our understanding about the activities involved in small group sensemaking. The results may also benefit the development of systems and tools to facilitate collaborative sensemaking process.
Online community and groups often experience heated discussion. This paper examines a WeChat group discussion from the perspective of majority and minority influence to explore the evolvement of the discussion and the behaviors of group members. Content analysis of 515 messages suggests that opinion conflicts between majority and minority evoke discussion engagement and knowledge exchange. There are different patterns of knowledge construction expressions between majority and minority groups. The majority prefer egocentric expression, while the minority prefer allocentric expression. Majority opinion holders have different conflict handling styles compared to minority opinion holders, who are more likely to avoid. Minority group is under great pressure in social interaction, they are easier to receive unfair comments and personal attacks.
This study explored primary school students’ usage of Internet for learning, and their attitudes towards using Internet. In this study, we recruited twenty-eight primary school students to write diaries on their Internet usage for learning and conducted focus groups to understand their thoughts and attitudes. The results showed that most primary students in our study regarded the Internet as a tool for fun rather than learning, so they rarely use Internet for learning. This study suggests that social factors like curricular requirements and parents’ attitude towards Internet have much influence on primary school students’ behaviors and attitudes towards the Internet, and provides advice for future guideline to motivate children to make better use of the Internet for their activities including learning in their everyday life.