Describing the distribution of engagement in an Internet support group by post frequency: A comparison of the 90–9-1 Principle and Zipf’s Law
Open accessAbstract
Sustainable online peer-to-peer support groups require engaged members. A metric commonly used to identify these members is the number of posts they have made. The 90-9-1 principle has been proposed as a ‘rule of thumb’ for classifying members using this metric with a recent study demonstrating the applicability of the principal to digital health social networks. Using data from a depression Internet support group, the current study sought to replicate this finding and to investigate in more detail the model of best fit for classifying participant contributions. Our findings replicate previous results and also find the fit of a power curve (Zipf distribution) to account for 98.6% of the variance. The Zipf distribution provides a more nuanced image of the data and may have practical application in assessing the ‘coherence’ of the sample.
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RCMP Cadet participation in daily surveys does not differ from the general population.
“RCMP Cadet participation does not differ from the general population”
From Trouble with the curve: the 90-9-1 rule to measure volitional participation inequalities among Royal Canadian Mounted Police cadets during training (2024) · cites this paper as [43]
The Method section describes posts by members of the BlueBoard internet support group, and the Results section analyzes their posting frequency. Searches for RCMP cadets, daily surveys, and a comparison with the general population found no passage addressing the claim. (LLM, conf=0.78)
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- Authors
- Carron-Arthur, B., Cunningham, J. A., & Griffiths, K. M.
- Affiliations
- Australian National University (AU)
- Venue
- Internet Interventions
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2014-10
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 165-168
- ISSN
- 2214-7829 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2025160127
- Cited by
- 64
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 3
- FWCI
- 9.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Internet Interventions (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- ANU Open Research (Australian National University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- NHMRC (1059620)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Health Literacy and Information Accessibility
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health via Writing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Expert finding and Q&A systems
- Keywords
- Zipf's law, online peer support groups, user engagement, post frequency, power-law distribution, depression, replication
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