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Job Posting Forum
 | Postdoctoral Fellowship in Social Computing |  | | | | | Institution/Organization: | Carnegie Mellon University | | Job Location: | Pennsylvania, U.S.A. | | Job Type: | Postdoctoral | | Contact Person: | John Levine | | Date Posted: | June 17th, 2010 | | Web Site: | http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/ | | | | |  |  | |
The Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is recruiting a postdoctoral fellow in psychology or computer science to support a new research project on language use and social support in online cancer support groups.
If online health support groups are effective, it is because of the conversations that are their “active ingredient.” The goals of this research are to understand how conversational dynamics influence group functioning and health quality of life in online support groups and to develop tools that can be used to analyze them and improve their effectiveness. The research has four sub-goals. (1) To understand how conversations in online support groups produce social support at the level of the conversational episode. For example, what must a person say to get others to respond empathically? (2) To understand how support in these groups influences group and health outcomes. (3) To develop tools to make the analysis of large corpora of health conversations tractable. (4) To use these tools to improve the training of support group facilitators by identifying helpful and problematic communication patterns in the groups they supervise. The fellow’s primarily responsibilities will be in goals 1 and 2, conducting empirical research on the causes and consequences of social support language by using the language analysis tools other project members are developing.
An ideal postdoctoral fellow will have interests and skills blending the study of small groups, social support and language analysis. The candidate must have a PhD in social psychology, health psychology or a related discipline and familiarity with computer science or language analysis or a PhD in computer science or a related discipline with familiarity with the social science research and methods. The postdoctoral fellow would be jointly supervised by Robert Kraut and John Levine, social psychologists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, respectively, and will work closely with Carolyn Rose, a computational linguist, and her students.
The postdoctoral fellow will participate in a broader research group on online social behavior. There will be opportunities to take courses at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that support advanced research skills (e.g., specialized statistics, research methodology classes, machine learning, small groups, social support). The fellowship can last for up to three years.
Interested candidates should send a personal statement describing career objectives, background and experience along with a CV in Word or PDF format to hcii-socialcomputing@lists.andrew.cmu.edu.
Have at least two references also sent to this address. Questions about the position should be addressed to robert.kraut@cmu.edu or jml@pitt.edu.
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