Thread titles often conceal a forum’s true intergroup relevance

Evidence

Each thread was coded as being related to the in-group, out-group, neither, or both. In many cases, the title was an unambiguous indicator of which category subsumed the thread. However, the first message of the thread was occasionally inconsistent with the information conveyed by the title. For example, in the “Movie Reviews” section, many threads were named after the movie being reviewed. Although almost none of the movie names were related to the in-group or out-group, it often became apparent from the thread’s first message that the movie was being reviewed because the writer thought it was relevant to the in-group or out-group. Thus, coding was based on (a) the thread’s title and (b) the first page of the thread’s first message. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1039

Categorization

• SHARE: Pointed observation for a colleague doing content analysis of online communities: relying on thread titles alone would miss most intergroup content on forums like Stormfront.