Co-constructing controversy: content analysis of collaborative knowledge negotiation in online communities

ABSTRACT

Knowledge sharing online has flourished within organizations as well as open online communities due to the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 platforms. This paper builds on previous studies of social construction of knowledge online and investigates how contributors in online communities collaboratively share and construct controversial scientific knowledge. As the general public participates in such knowledge collaboration, understanding the processes through which they contribute content and roles that they play is imperative. The authors conducted the content analysis of three online communities that engage in knowledge collaboration on the subject of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccination, which is perceived as contentious knowledge by the public due to the widespread myth among parents that the MMR vaccine is associated with autism. The study's findings include that the content discussed is influenced by the purposes of the communities, nature of the tasks, and demographics of participants, although they discussed the same topic. The authors also found that the framework of knowledge reuse and knowledge co-construction sites is useful for investigating the content and roles that appeared in the three communities. The contribution of the paper includes the analytical framework of knowledge reuse and knowledge co-construction, articulation of the content and roles that appeared in online communities, and unboxing of discourses in three different online communities. Future research directions are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge collaboration
• online communities
• controversy
• Web 2.0

Acknowledgements

We are greatly appreciative of Kjersten Hild and Jylisa Doney for her help in coding sections of the data to establish inter-rater reliability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Noriko Hara is an associate professor in the Department of Information & Library Science, School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. Her research in Social Informatics emphasizes online knowledge collaboration, communities of practice, and collective behaviors in mediated environments. [email: [email protected]]

Madelyn Sanfilippo is a doctoral candidate in Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington's School of Informatics and Computing. Madelyn is specifically interested in social and political issues surroudning information and information technology access. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. There is significant overlap in contribution between the pages for MMR vaccine and pages for: Varicella, Vaccination, Hives, Reye's Syndrome, Autism spectrum, MMRV vaccine, and Varicella vaccine. Pages with common contributors to the MMR vaccine Controversy page include: Autism spectrum, The Lancet, BMJ, and Andrew Wakefield, among others. This was measured by considering contributors as edges between pages, as nodes, using NodeXL.