Providing Trustworthy Advice Online

Part 2: Full PapersInternational audienceThe Internet serves as an important source for people who are looking for information and advice from peers. Within search behavior a central role is reserved for trust; it will guide the decision to participate online, to share experiences or to pick up information. This paper explores insights from discursive psychology as a potentially interesting approach for trust research in online peer environments. This allows for a certain shift of focus. Instead of looking at the information seeker, we focus on the information provider: How does he try to present himself – and the information sources he refers to in his arguments – as trustworthy and authoritative? Within this theoretical perspective trust is being studied as something that is highly negotiable depending on context and the effect the information provider tries to achieve. Throughout the paper conversation fragments - collected from an online forum on home-improvement - are incorporated to clarify and illustrate some central concepts of discursive psychology

Accounting for risk and responsibility associated with smoking among mothers of children with respiratory illness.

Contemporary public health discourses construct individuals as rational, responsible and knowledgeable, and thus promote a self-controlled prudent response to risk. In the context of evidence emphasising risks to children's health associated with passive smoking, mothers of children with respiratory illness may knowingly place their children at increased risk should they continue to smoke in their presence. Drawing on an analysis of depth qualitative interview accounts with mothers who smoke and whose young child was recently admitted to hospital with respiratory illness, this study describes mothers' constructions of risk and responsibility associated with their smoking. Three forms of accounting style were identified: 'stories of acceptability'; 'denial of agency'; and 'reflections of guilt'. 'Stories of acceptability' either positioned the risk of passive smoking as contained and controlled to an acceptable level, or disputed the level of risk that passive smoke posed. 'Denial of agency' drew on discourses of addiction and shared responsibility to exonerate the mother of responsibility or blame. 'Reflections of guilt' were presented when contradictions arose within accounts, particularly in relation to discussions of agency and rationality in decision-making. The study illustrates how constructions of moral responsibility, especially in relation to being a 'good mother', framed mothers' accounts of smoking in the face of risk. The study concludes that far greater consideration be given to the way in which mothers rationalise their smoking to others if paediatric doctors are to foster risk reduction practices associated with passive smoking more effectively