Methods

7

The nature of anorexia as comparative and competitive raises the possibility that public recording of struggles with the disorder, as may appear in recovery blogs, poses risks along with benefits. I selected ten blogs to study how comparative thinking in recovery blogs might affect bloggers, and how blogs might avoid becoming a detriment to recovery. All the blogs were publicly accessible, and as a genre, blogs invite comment, response, and recirculation. Indeed, the purpose of a blog is to reach an unknown audience, and a blog’s success is typically judged by the number of readers who cite it and/or create additional links to it. In this study I have identified the blogs I studied only by pseudonyms since I am quoting from them in a non-digital space. The blogs were written by women aged fourteen to (about) twenty-five from the United States and the United Kingdom. All are striving to recover from eating disorders after having reached some very low point, such as being hospitalized or close to death. To procure a corpus of posts, I selected blogs based primarily on bloggers’ frequency of posts (every day or every few days) and the variety of content in their posts. For example, some bloggers posted every meal of every day as the substance of their post, while others included a few meals but also much personal reflection on behaviors, while still others emphasized additional interests as well, such as fashion. Focusing on the type of post content enabled a survey and analysis of thematic patterns.

8

After selecting blogs, I read impressionistically and then analytically (as recommended by Thomas Huckin in his guide to textual analysis), noting trends in each blog to identify several common categories related to comparability, competition, and confession: apologies for negativity or for not keeping up with others’ posts, daily eat-centric posts, behavior confession posts, and posts related to “other,” non-ED interests. Often, of course, a post would include more than one of these categories. I studied a total of 1,909 posts, averaging about 272 per blog.¹ I noted the primary and secondary topic of each blog, as shown in the following table.