Conversational repairs on Reddit: Widely initiated but often uncompleted

Area of Science:

• Social Interaction and Communication
• Computational Linguistics
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Conversational repair is a universal system for maintaining mutual understanding in social interactions.
• Previous research focused on offline synchronous communication, leaving the prevalence in online asynchronous text-based interactions unclear.
• Online interactions are crucial for public deliberation, necessitating an understanding of repair mechanisms in these contexts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the prevalence and emergence of conversational repairs in online asynchronous text-based interactions.
• To compare repair patterns in online environments with those observed in offline contexts.
• To identify factors influencing the completion of conversational repairs in online communities.

Main Methods:

• Conducted two analyses of Other-initiated repairs in 25 diverse English-language Reddit communities (subreddits).
• Examined the frequency and emergence patterns of repair initiations across different subreddits and comment thread lengths.
• Quantified the rate of repair initiations that received no subsequent reply.

Main Results:

• Repair initiations were widespread across all analyzed subreddits and frequent, occurring in 58.48% of interactions.
• The likelihood of a repair initiation increased with comment thread length, with a median time-to-repair of 6 turns.
• A significant portion (44.80%) of repair initiations received no reply, indicating a potential lack of completion.

Conclusions:

• Conversational repair initiations are prevalent and emerge similarly in online asynchronous interactions as in offline contexts.
• The online medium appears to alter the completion dynamics of conversational repairs compared to offline interactions.
• Further research is needed to understand the implications of uncompleted repairs in online communication and explore future research avenues.