This achievement represents a creative implementation of survey methodology into internet society research. 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
Survey research literature predominantly focuses on methodological issues, which are related to the fielding activities of the survey data collection process. Much less attention is given to the broader administrative, managerial, infrastructural and process-integration aspects of pre-fielding (i.e., planning, conceptualization, questionnaire development, testing) and post-fielding (i.e., data preparation, automated analysis, archiving, dissemination, publication). There is also a serious lack of attention to the integrative potential of information-communication technology (ICT) for the survey process, at least in the mainstream (or in vast majority) of ICT tools that support the survey data collection process. This issue is only dealt within some large survey data collection organisations (see for example special issue of Journal of Official Statistics (e.g. Biemer et al. 2013)), which however are not the focus of this chapter.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33079645
Empirical studies within social sciences face an important decision about how to express key findings to the target audience. Simplicity is an important selection criterion here, because the findings need to be conveyed in an efficient manner (i.e., briefly and concisely), but also because stakeholders (e.g., policy makers, the media, general public) are heterogeneous in their methodological backgrounds. The corresponding ways of measuring thus need to be not only exhaustive and message-delivering but also simple and intuitively understandable. This is particularly important when dynamics in time are discussed. There, most typically, either absolute or relative differences are used. This review paper critically elaborates these two popular measures and, in addition, discusses the alternatives of time distance and time step. The paper demonstrates that even in simple linear examples, the results of these four types of measures may sharply contradict. The empirical example of the digital divide is also elaborated, which illustrates many tempting possibilities for biased, one-sided interpretations that match the needs of certain stakeholders. Finally, the paper alerts users about possible misleading conclusions and suggests comprehensive treatments, using several measures simultaneously
COBISS.SI-ID: 31605597