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People often turn to support groups, when they find themselves in stressful circumstances, such as serious health conditions. With the increase in the availability and popularity of internet, the possibility has arisen to join online support groups. Various authors have raised potential disadvantages of these groups, such as the lack of control of the quality of the information that is exchanged and the concern that the exchange within the group might include socially inappropriate remarks. In this study we explored to what extent these potential disadvantages actually occur. In addition, we explored who uses Dutch online support groups and what is exchanged by the participants. By means of “content analysis” we analyzed a random sample of 1500 messages from publicly available online support groups for patients with breast cancer, arthritis and fibromyalgia. It appeared that the online support groups under study were mainly used by female patients. A major part of the postings contained “off topic” remarks. Popular health related topics were “restrictions in daily life” and “regular medications”. Only in a minor proportion of the postings, potential disadvantages were present. Therefore this research suggest that online support groups are a viable option for support. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which investigates the evolution of library use and development of literacy in adolescence in the U.S. It is the primary objective of the research to determine the factors of literacy that cover academic literacy, community literacy and personal literacy. However, literacy in adolescents differ from the traditional conception because young readers have their own tastes and become increasingly discriminating.

The cut cotton sample used for the commercial evaluation of cotton bales is taken at a single point from one or two sides of the bale. It should be verified that this sample is sufficient to perform an H2SD stickiness measurement that is adequately precise to avoid litigation. If a more representative sampling method must be used, this is also beneficial for other technological measurements. The study into the feasibility of producing standard cottons (Beltwide, 2002) has already demonstrated the advantages of mixing cotton bales by cotton breaker as this reduces the dispersion coefficient of H2SD measurements from 7 to 1.5. The dispersion coefficient corresponds to the ratio between the variance and the mean of the counts. Its value is ideally 1 for sticky points distributed randomly within a perfectly homogeneous bale. It reaches 4.4 for cotton from the Sudan (Fonteneau Tamime, 2000) and only 2.7 for cotton from the USA (Héquet, 2003). A large part of the variability observed in stickiness measurements is therefore due to within-bale heterogeneity, and attempts can be made to reduce this by improving sampling methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]