Adapting grounded theory to construct a taxonomy of affect in collaborative online chat

Abstract

Distributed collaborative teams increasingly rely on online tools for interaction and communication in both social and task-oriented goals. Measuring and modeling these interactions along different dimensions can help understand, and better design for, distributed collaboration. Affect is one such dimension that can play a crucial role in the dynamics, creativity, and productivity of distributed groups. We contribute an adaptation of the grounded theory methodology as a flexible and extensible means for constructing a taxonomy of affect in text-based online communication. Such a taxonomy can serve as an analytic lens for the continued investigation of the role of affect in creative collaborative endeavors as mediated by communication technology. We describe our modified grounded theory approach and then validate our method by constructing a taxonomy with data from chat logs collected during a longitudinal study of a multi-cultural distributed scientific collaboration.