Understanding the article Coming out in the age of the Internet: Identity ‘demarginalization’ through virtual group by McKenna, K. A. & Bargh, J. A. (1998) through journal article analysis, to find the hypothesis, method of research, selection of sampling, procedure of experiment, and the finding of the experiment.
This journal has few hypotheses as within this one journal three study were done. The first hypothesis is “that people with concealable stigmatized identities would be more likely to become involved in the internet newsgroups and would consider membership in such virtual groups to be more important to their lives than would people with marginalized-conspicuous and mainstream identities, as indicated by their behavioral reactions to evaluative feedback from their group member” (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). This mean that people who hid their identities on the internet because they feel that they are devalued in the society will make the virtual group more important to their lives than those that have little reason or a minority group to conceal themselves or have value as directed by mainstream cultural society. The second hypothesis is “that among the people who identify with a marginalized social group via the Internet, those who participated actively in that group would benefit more in terms of self-acceptance and self-esteem than those who do not” (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). This hypothesis suggests that the group or sub-group of minority people who was push to the edge of society outside of the internet and actively participate in the virtual group will gains the realization of self-acceptance and increase in higher self-esteem than those who do not participate as actively. The third hypothesis is “that the positivity of the response to posters in the concealable-stigma groups would have a greater effect on their subsequent posting behavior. It also follows from the hypothesis of greater group importance that there should be a higher overall frequency of posting per person in marginalized-concealable versus mainstream or marginalized-conspicuous newsgroups” (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). This hypothesis is a prediction of the researchers that the people who hid their identities tend to post more regularly in the newsgroup then those accepted by the mainstream.
The hypothesis of this journal is that people that are considered as concealable-stigma identity will place more important on the virtual newsgroup in their lives than those with mainstream identities. The more actively they participate in the newsgroups that gains more self-acceptance and have higher self-esteem. The independent variable of this experiment is the Internet virtual newsgroup and the dependent variable is the times and regularity of the posting by the people in the virtual newsgroup. The target population are the people with concealable-stigma identities.
The researchers use random sampling to select the subject for the experiment for the study by selecting 12 newsgroups with four newsgroups with subject in each of the category of mainstream, marginalized-conspicuous, and marginalized-concealable. Using survey, self-introduction, questionnaires, and poster’s name the researchers conclude that teenage male mostly participates in marginalized-concealable newsgroups and mainly middle-age females participant in the mainstream newsgroups (Mckenna & Bargh, 1998). Of the returned surveys the researchers concluded that the sample size to be 77, with age ranged from 15-65 years old, an average of 34 years old (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). The experiment was conducted at the University of Konstanz in Germany for a period of three weeks.
The method of this experiment started with selection 12 newsgroups for the three categories of mainstream, marginalized-conspicuous, and marginalized-concealable (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). Except for one of the newsgroup all the newsgroup belongs to the newsgroup hierarchy of alt., which are approximately about 650 newsgroups (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). The number of newsgroups is than reduce with the elimination of newsgroup which only post pictures or personal advertisement and group with less than 100 posts per week (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). Of the original 650 alt. newsgroup there are only left with 53 newsgroups (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). Of the 53 newsgroup the author than separated the newsgroups on the poster as an average person would be unwilling to use their real name, which the researchers than reduced the number of newsgroup to four sample for marginalized newsgroups and three sample for mainstream groups (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). The responses are than coded using four different codes, analysis of the frequency of the posting, and reply to feedback (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). From study two and three the members of the newsgroup were asked from scale of one thru three if their identity were to be reveal how embarrassed they would be and on the scale of one thru seven how society would mark as a disgrace of the identity covered (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). There were surveys and questionnaires that was sent to the members of the newsgroups through emails on the level of social isolation and the feeling of separation from society (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). To find the correlations of the variables in the outcome the researchers conducted a structural equation modeling and “tested a process model of identity demarginalization” to confirm their analysis (McKenna & Bargh, 1998).
The researchers were able to measures the dependent variables through the posting in the newsgroups, questionnaires, survey, the identity demarginalization model, and structural equation model. The measurement for this experiment is valid as information are received from various sources which can lower the number of erroneous information receive if researcher only get information from only one source. The result of this experiment shows the higher regularity of posting in the newsgroup by that people with concern for their identities; which that feedbacks posting influenced the member’s behavior of this group (McKenna & Bargh, 1998). With this information the researchers’ hypotheses were supported.
The people with concern with their identities placed the Internet newsgroup more important to their lives as supported by the numbers of posting, boost in their self-acceptance, and higher self-esteem (McKenna & Bargh, 1998).
