Authors : Radzuwan Ab Rashid and Kamariah Yunus
Abstract: This study is part of a larger study investigating teachers’ co-construction of social support on a social networking site. It reports the participants’ views of the use of facebook postings to engage with emotional support. Four categories of viewsemerged from the analysis which are the ‘Avid (+AV)’, the ‘Analytic (+AC)’, the ‘Anxious (+AS)’ and the ‘Agnostic(-AC)’. The teachers with positive views (+AV, +AC, +AS) emphasize the affordances of facebook in coping with emotional turbulence in their professional lives whilst the teachers with negative views mainly worry about the unintended consequences that might arise when teachers seek emotional support on the site. This study concludes that teachers’ views of the use of timeline postings as a mechanism to seek emotional support are influenced by their level of their participation on facebook, such as whether they are active users, lurkers or non-users.
Radzuwan Ab Rashid and Kamariah Yunus, 2016. Teachers’ Engagement with Emotional Support on a Social Networking Site. The Social Sciences, 11: 3450-3457.