- Karthik Gopalakrishnan, IIT Patna
Motivation
Online social networking sites like Facebook are among the most popular sites on the Web today, with billions of users socializing through such sites on a daily basis. Businesses are actively using such sites for viral marketing, for example, through Facebook pages sharing commercial content, through targeted advertisements, and so on. The massive usage and reliance on online social networks led me to ask:
a) Are people's offline lives influenced by their usage of online social networks?
b) What factors influence online interaction?
This study aims at answering these questions in the context of Facebook, one of the most popular online social networks today. Of the many forms of interaction possible on Facebook, "liking" is the most popular form and getting a large number of "likes" is of economic interest to businesses and often of personal interest to individuals as well. Hence, this study focuses on "liking" and aims at answering why people "like" or choose not to "like" stuff on Facebook.
Related Work
Ethan Kross, a social psychologist and faculty associate at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, and his team conducted a small study which showed that Facebook use could predict declines in happiness. In other words, the more you use Facebook, the more your life satisfaction drops. The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, included 82 young adults who used Facebook and had smartphones. The researchers gauged their well-being by texting the study participants five times a day for two weeks. The texts had links to online survey questions including: "How do you feel right now?", "How lonely do you feel right now?", "How much have you used Facebook since the last time we talked?", and "How much have you interacted with other people 'directly' since the last time we talked?" The researchers found an association between increased time using Facebook and decreased well-being. However, they did not find that direct interaction with people -- whether face-to-face, or on the phone -- decreased well-being. They were also able to rule out the idea that people go on Facebook when they are feeling lonely, because Facebook use and loneliness predicted the happiness levels of the study participants. Similarly, a study published in 2013 by researchers at the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt University in Berlin led by Hanna Krasnova showed that going on Facebook made one in three people more dissatisfied with their lives.
Methodology & Data
A survey was designed to collect data in order to answer the two motivating questions. The Satisfaction with Life scale by Ed Diener was employed and questions about people's Facebook usage were asked in order to understand the impact of Facebook usage on people's offline lives. Likert scale statements were also employed in order to learn what factors affect people's decisions to "like" or not "like" stuff on Facebook.
The survey was administered online and data was collected from three continents. After filtering out meaningless responses, there were 44 responses which were processed to ensure all responses were uniform in format. The largest number of responses were from the United States, closely followed by India. A few responses were obtained from European countries such as the UK, Switzerland and Portugal. The majority of responses were from people who were between 18 and 22 years old, both inclusive. The number of males responses was slightly higher than the number of female responses.
Key Results
a) People who spend more time on Facebook are slightly less satisfied in life than those who spend less time on Facebook.
b) People who spend more time on Facebook tend to "like" more posts. However, this is only observed as the time spent increases from less than 30 minutes per day to 1-2 hours per day. People spending 2-4 hours per day tend to "like" lesser posts than those who spend 1-2 hours per day.
c) Relationship strength plays an important role in people's "liking" decisions.
d) Geographical separation plays an important role in people's "liking" decisions.
e) People tend to "like" personal content such as photos more often than impersonal content.
Conclusion & Future Work
This study has made several empirical contributions. First, we see that people who spend more time on Facebook are less satisfied in life than the ones who spend less time on Facebook. Second, we see that people spending longer-than-usual amounts of time on Facebook tend to be selective in "liking" content. And finally, we see that a number of factors affect people's "liking" decisions, such as geographical separation, relationship strength and post type.
There are several ways to improve and extend this study. By employing subjective happiness and well-being scales, it could be seen whether a correlation exists between happiness levels and Facebook activity. In order to draw broader implications, a larger number of responses needs to be obtained and analysed. The variance in responses from different countries could also be studied.
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