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Since the 1990s special platforms exist on the internet which offer information and communication for people with eating disorder. Their function is consistently and ambivalently discussed. The study analyses the expectations and the perceived benefit of the persons who use self-help internet platforms and identifies moderators. Data of 230 user of a self-help platform were collected. Scales about general motives of internet use were modified and provided a basis. Results: The most important factor for gratifications sought and obtained was social helpfulness in terms of reciprocal social support. Furthermore the will to recovery (gratification sought) and convenient information retrieval (gratification obtained) played an important role. Significant moderators for gratifications sought were psychological strain, the age of the user and the duration of eating disorder. Gratifications obtained were primarily influenced by the degree of utilization of the platform offers and the use of non-medial offers. The results confirm cues to reasons of use from former studies and concretize them by explicit factors of gratifications sought and obtained. The study has been a first effort to create a theoretical model in the context of media psychological research. Thus also moderators with impact on gratifications sought and obtained for user of such internet platforms could be identified.
The amount of information on the Web is constantly increasing and also there is a wide variety of information available such as news, encyclopedia articles, statistics, survey data, stock information, events, bibliographies etc. The information is characterized by heterogeneity in aspects such as information type, modality, structure, granularity, quality and by its distributed nature. The two primary techniques by which users on the Web are looking for information are (1) using Web search engines and (2) browsing the links between information. The dominant mode of information presentation is mainly static in the form of text, images and graphics. Interactive visualizations offer a number of advantages for the presentation and exploration of heterogeneous information on the Web: (1) They provide different representations for different, very large and complex types of information and (2) large amounts of data can be explored interactively using their attributes and thus can support and expand the cognition process of the user. So far, interactive visualizations are still not an integral part in the search process of the Web. The technical standards and interaction paradigms to make interactive visualization usable by the mass are introduced only slowly through standardatization organizations. This work examines how interactive visualizations can be used for the linking and search process of heterogeneous information on the Web. Based on principles in the areas of information retrieval (IR), information visualization and information processing, a model is created, which extends the existing structural models of information visualization with two new processes: (1) linking of information in visualizations and (2) searching, browsing and filtering based on glyphs. The Vizgr toolkit implements the developed model in a web application. In four different application scenarios, aspects of the model will be instantiated and are evaluated in user tests or examined by examples.