Erimielisyyden osoittamisen keinot nuorille suunnatulla keskustelufoorumilla

The objective of this study was to observe the ways in which young people indicate disagreement in asynchronous online discussions. The analysis is focused at how argumentative online discussions are constructed, the ways in which the speakers indicate disagreement and the attributes and functions of those disagreements. One area of the analysis is the context in which the disagreements appear: in what part of the conversation they appear, how other speakers react to them and which types of disagreement appear side by side in one turn. The conversation analytic view of turn-taking and the constructions of turns work as a background for this study. The data for this study was collected from an online discussion forum targeted at young people, named Demi.fi, from which I chose three discussion threads on the same subject: the diversity of genders and gender equality. These threads had 344 messages altogether, and in 261 of them the speaker indicates disagreement. I approached the data through qualitative research, utilizing the method of conversation analysis. I started by locating all assessments and the disagreeing turns connected to them, and after that I categorized the types of disagreements and analyzed the more specific functions of these categories. The conclusions of this study tell that in these three argumentative discussion threads, the speakers indicated disagreement in ways that can be divided into seven categories: statements, the challenging questions and their answers in question-answer adjacency pairs, accusations, the negative emotional reactions of the speaker, irony, misunderstandings and concessions that have attributes of both agreements and disagreements. Each of these categories had their own specific attributes and functions. Statements were the most frequently used disagreements in the discussions, but direct, emotional disagreements were rather frequent as well. Disagreements were usually indicated by negatively evaluating the assessment or the persona of the other speaker, but they could also be indicated by challenging power hierarchies by – for example – turning the other speaker into a laughing-stock. Because disagreeing second turns were much more frequent than agreeing second turns, it's justified to say that in the context of an argumentative online discussion, the otherwise popular belief of agreeing being preferred turns out to be dispreferred. The conclusions give teachers an opportunity to understand the ways of disagreeing that are typical for young people. This also enables the guidance towards respectful, constructive argumentation.