The author is using empirical research for his paper. He starts with defining the problem and choosing the objective of the work and asking the questions in the end of introductory part. It is interesting that with the questions author is dividing work in two: finding the concept functions and fitting these for existing community.
The paper is clearly quantitative research. Author clearly describes the purpose in the abstract part and it’s understood that author is trying to create a concept of functions of groups in online community. Author goes through the different theories of communities and group functions and explains the broader meaning.
The literature review and analysis in the first part of the work has big influence on the research questions and concepts. The author proposed 13 concepts of functions and tested these with the survey. The strategy of the research was quantitative as using a survey questions formed from initial concepts to existing online community rada7.ee. The survey design is small sample 387 registered users out of 5000 users of the community. He uses questionnaire containing 43 questions all the questions in 5-point scale. In the conclusions part author analyses the outcome of the survey and measures the results with the factor analysis, principal component analysis method and Varimax rotation. In the end the author is proposing the concept for trying out with other online communities.
The used methodology was not the best choice for the research and would have been design research for creating the concept and testing it with different online communities. Using only one community for the concept is not enough and takes away possibility to compare and measure the outcome more precisely.
Priidu Tammeorg
IMKE 2008
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