Review of Empirical Researches on Social Network Sites

Transcription

1 Review of Empirical Researches on Social Network Sites Yinan Yu and Yan Zhu Management Science and Engineering Department in School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University Beijing, , China {yuyn.10, ABSTRACT Social network sites (SNSs) intrigue the academic and industry for their heir large numbers of users, broad coverage and astonishing increment speed, and attracts more and more attentions of them. This paper reviews empirical researches on SNSs at individual level, and categorizes them into two parts. The first part investigates the factors affect usages of SNSs and the second part examines what kind of effects the SNSs bring to users. After summarizing the main contents and features of the two kinds of existing studies concerning SNSs, we conclude with considerations for future research. Keywords Social network sites (SNSs), Facebook, antecedents, use, social capital, privacy 1. INTRODUCTION Social network sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn have attracted hundreds of millions of users, and become part of users daily life since their introduction. Four different terms for Facebook have arisen in Hitwise s Top 10 search terms, including Facebook login and which account for 3.48% of all searches in the US among the top 50 terms. Furthermore, Facebook.com has firstly topped Google.com as the most-visited website of the year in March 2010 [1]. SNSs have been also experiencing incredible growth in China since Nowadays, many SNSs like renren.com (which began among students in high schools and universities and is a successful imitator of Facebook), kaixin001.com (which aims at white-collar population), douban.com and so on, attract lots of users by online community. At the same time, researchers, mass media and business persons in China have shown a lot of interests on SNSs and their trendy. There are variety kinds of SNSs, which allow individuals to present themselves, articulate their social networks, and establish or maintain connections with others [2]. Some sites, such as Facebook.com, renren.com, etc., support the maintenance of existing off-line social networks and some others help strangers connect according to their shared interests and similar purposes, like dating site (e.g. Match.com) and business-related site (e.g. Linkedin.com). Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language, racial, or religious. SNSs provide a great deal of services, such as creating users own space, sharing photos, maintaining blogs, instant messaging (IM), and so on. Scholars from disparate fields have examined SNSs usage in order to understand the practices, implications, cultures, and meanings of the sites, as well as users engagement with them [3]. Most of them select Facebook.com as their research platform, which is the most famous social network site. We review empirical researches that are directly concerned with SNSs at individual level in this paper, and then categorize them into two parts. The first part investigates which factors affect usages of SNSs, and the second part examines what kind of effects usages of SNSs bring to users. After summarizing the main contents and features of the two kinds of existing researches concerning SNSs, we conclude with considerations to set a stage for future research. Definition 2. BACKGROUND According to the definition of Wikipedia, SNS is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people [4]. Boyd and Ellison define SNS as a kind of web-based service that allows individuals to three kinds of things. First, construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system. Second, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection. Third, view and traverse their list of connections within the system [3]. All the definition of constructors mentioned in this article are shown in Table I. From the above definitions, we can conclude some common features of SNSs and the main difference distinguishing SNSs from instant message and blogs. That is the nature of socializing, which makes SNSs essentially consist of a representation of each user (often a profile) and his/her social links, and an individualcentered service.

2 Constructer SNS self-efficacy Table I. Definitions of constructers Definition a kind of web-based service that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections within the system [3]. the belief in one s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments [5] need for cognition individual s tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors [5] need to belong Collective self-esteem situation factors people need to be loved and socially accepted collective self-esteem: that aspect of the individuals self-concept which derives from their knowledge of their membership in a social group together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership [5] the aspect of the individuals self-concept which derives from their knowledge of their membership in a social group together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership [5] strength and nature of relationships with other members, perceived risk, and privacy and security issues and so on privacy dilemma privacy needs and the need for sociability and content sharing [13] social capital resources accumulated through the relationships among people [2] bridging social capital bonding social capital maintained social capital Bridging social capital is linked to weak ties, which are loose connections between individuals who may provide useful information or new perspectives for one another but typically not emotional support [2] bonding social capital is found between individuals in tightly-knit, emotionally close relationships, such as family and close friends [2] the ability to maintain valuable connections as one progresses through life changes [2] Development SNS has existed over a decade, and its development mainly contains three phases. The first phase began in 1997, when the first SNS, SixDegrees.com, was launched. It allowed users to do the basic and most essential work, such as creating profiles, listing friends and so on [3]. The second phase started in 2001, when Ryze.com was launched. Some other similar SNSs, such as Linkedin etc, were established during this period, and they focused on a certain topic or function, such as business. The third phase began after the year Many multimedia-shared SNSs, such as Flickr.com and YouTube.com, arose from the development of UGC (user generated contents). After that, comprehensive SNSs like Facebook started to emerge. The first kind of researches focuses on which individuals use SNSs, how and why they use them, and what kind of antecedents affect usage of SNSs. As Figure 1 shown, passing researches involve three aspects: self-description, socioeconomic factors and situation factors. 3. ANTECEDENTS OF SNS USAGE Figure 1. Antecedents of SNS usage

3 First, in self-trait part, some researchers pay attention to the influence of social identity. Gangadharbatla found that Internet self-efficacy, need to belong, and collective self-esteem have positive influences on attitudes toward SNS use [5]. Furthermore, attitudes fully mediate the relationship between willingness to join SNS and Internet self-efficacy and need to belong and partially mediate the relationship between willingness to join and collective self-esteem. Additional psychological predictors like selfconstrual [6] are discussed in detail. Others focus on different personality s influence on SNSs usage [7][8][9]. For example, Orr et al. support that shyness is positively correlated with the time spent on Facebook and negatively correlated with the number of Facebook friends [9]. Second aspect comes to socioeconomic factors. Dimensions like age, gender, income level, culture, and ethnicity are usually discussed [6][10][11][12]. Hargittai found that a person s gender, race and ethnicity, and parental educational background are all associated with use of SNSs [12]. For example, Hispanic students are significantly more likely to use MySpace than are Whites in the sample, while Asian and Asian American students are significantly less likely to use MySpace. Third, situation factors refer to strength and nature of relationships with other members, perceived risk, and privacy and security issues and so on [5]. Scholars pay much attention to the privacy issues [13][14][15][16]. Brandtzæg et. al study the privacy dilemma issue, especially on how multiple social ties and groups on SNSs affect users social privacy, and what kind of differences in practices and experiences of sociability, content sharing, and privacy are, between younger and older adults [13]. One of their finding, for example, is that younger users are more skilled social networkers and more likely to be aware of and to change privacy settings compared to the older. This first point of view of research attracts many scholars from different disciplines. Researchers from not only information system and management, but also computer science, psychology, sociology and mass communication show a lot of interests and do much of research work on this fangle, in order to figure out why so many individuals, especially young people, take their time and energy for SNSs. 4. SNS USAGES AND OUTCOMES As illustrated in Figure 2, second kind of studies focuses on SNS usages and their outcomes. Figure 2 SNS usage and outcomes Researches of SNSs usages have pay attention to different aspects. Some scholars conclude what SNSs can provide for their users. According to Boyd and Ellison [3], SNSs are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections within the system. Others focus on researching users behaviors on some special usages or applications of SNSs [17] [18]. For instance, Golder et. al. [18] select two kind of usages of SNS, messaging and poking, and use them as proxies to reflect college students' daily, weekly and seasonal schedules and to discuss their use as a way for college students to support both distant and geographically proximate relationships. Additionally, Lampe et al. [19] look at how use and perception of Facebook.com has changed over time indicated by their three consecutive years of survey data and interviews. They find that there was little change in Facebook use over time in most ways. Finally, SNSs usages are always broken down and measured by constructs like SNS use time, average stay time per log-in, number of friends in SNS, and profile length [6][9]. Usages of SNSs bring several positive outcomes. First, SNSs can help maintain existing offline relationships or enhance existing relationships [20][21]. According to Lampe et al., their research objects through both survey and interview show that they are typically using the site to maintain lightweight contact with relationships they have developed offline [19]. Second, scholars examine the relationship between the use of SNSs and the formation and maintenance of social capital (benefits received from individuals in one s network) [2][21]. Ellison et. al. [2] found strong positive associations between usage of SNSs and the three types of social capital (bonding social capital, bridging social capital and maintained social capital), with the strongest relationship being to bridging social capital. Third, SNSs can satisfy users non-social needs such as entertainment, recreation, searching information and sharing contents. In addition, Chen started to research what factors would influence the continue use of professional virtual communities (PVC) by using Expectation-Confirmation Theory (ECT), and found that

4 the contextual factor and technological factors both exert significant impacts on PVC participants continuance intentions [22]. As a nature of sociability of SNSs, large part of the second kind of research discuss social capital issue, which is accepted as one of the most important benefits of SNSs and the key factors for their continuous development. 5. DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH As described in the prior section, SNSs have attracted lot of researchers from disparate disciplines, different region and culture to do research on this topic, because of their broad coverage and amazing increment speed. Given the continuing interest and empirical attention to SNSs, we provide this review paper and some potential directions for future researches. Usually, large numbers of studies about predictors of the adoption of certain new technology will emerge during the initial stage of its introduction, and so is the same for SNSs. Many researches about antecedents of SNSs usage have been done, and it has important practical implication for the improvement of design of SNSs. As SNSs are complicated systems, there are still lots of influencing factors needed to discuss in the future research, which could suggest devising effective strategies that take into account differing levels of users for website owners, and could be helpful to enhance perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use [23][24] of SNSs for users in order to increase membership and participation, and bring more revenue for operators of the sites. Furthermore, a relatively integrated conception model including different aspects of antecedent variables maybe useful to understand this issue completely. Other potentially promising avenue for future research could be consequences of SNS adoption. As discussed above, social capital is center topic in this research field, and several studies have discussed the positive impact SNSs usage can bring to form or maintain social capital for users. However, as the number of friends on SNSs increases and different kinds of friends or groups hold different kinds of relationship with the user, one user usually face diverse social capital in the same time in this transparent environment. Generally, an individual performs differently when facing distinct social capitals. As a result, on one hand, we need to study social capital itself and add some new meanings to it in surrounding of SNSs, on the other hand, we need to dig deeper into what kind of social capital could be mixed and in what way it is suitable in socially transparent environments such as SNSs [13]. Sociability is not the only positive outcome of SNSs, as we mentioned before. However, there is little research on benefits that has little to do with sociability or connections about SNSs. Future research may also exam this non-social benefit of SNSs by using theories or models from different disciplines. Finally, although we divide research on SNSs into two parts, these two parts are not completely divorced and have no relationship with each other. Actually, interrelation may exist between these two parts. For instance, benefits of using SNSs may have effects on the motivation for SNSs usage, and people with common motivations may get different benefits from SNSs usage. That is to say, this direction may be a meaningful research topic in the future. REFERENCES [1] emarketer (2006), Is Facebook Really No.1?. Available at (accessed January 11, 2011). [2] Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, Cliff Lampe (2007). The Benefits of Facebook Friends: Social Capital and College Students Use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (2007) [3] Danah M. Boyd, Nicole B. Ellison (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History,and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) [4] Wikipedia Social Network Service. Retrieved April 1, 2011 from World Wide Web: [5] Harsha Gangadharbatla (2007). Facebook Me: Collective Self-Esteem, Need to Belong, and Internet Self-Efficacy as Predictors of the igeneration s Attitudes toward Social Networking Sites. Journal of Interactive Advertising, Special Issue on Online User Generated Content June 9, 2007 [6] Jang Hyun Kima,Min-Sun Kima, Yoonjae Nam (2010). An Analysis of Self-Construals, Motivations, Facebook Use, and User Satisfaction. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 6(11 12) , 2010 [7] Emma L. Pelling, Katherine M. White (2009). The Theory of Planned Behavior Applied to Young People s Use of Social Networking Web Sites. CyberPsychology & Behavior Volume 12, Number 6, 2009 [8] Michael A. Stefanone, Chyng-Yang Jang (2008). Writing for Friends and Family: The Interpersonal Nature of Blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008)

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