A tool for dynamic measurement of social capital embedded in Online Social Networks.

Abstract

This paper suggests a methodological improvement to study social capital in online social networks. We have designed a measurement tool based on Lin's theory of social resources. It is named Social Village and can be accessed in (http://socialvillage.me). By this tool, we are getting access to profile and friendship data of users of online social networks (Facebook and Google Plus). To access this data, we ask for users' permission by social login and we have designed a gamified and interesting social survey that helps users get an in-depth knowledge of their online life. This tool combines three structural generators for social capital data (name, position and resource generators) and it has been developed in three languages (English, French and Persian) enabling us to conduct comparative studies. Based on our preliminary results presented in this paper, 412 users in sample of our study know who they are connected with in online social networks, they know their friends' socioeconomic positions and they are providing or receiving various resources through their online friendships. Gamified social survey used in this tool helped us gain a four times more response rate than existing online surveys. In this paper, we present, reviewed literature, theoretical framework, methodology of constructing the tool and results obtained.

The Circles of Connections

“…Despite the engaging features, Socilab does not support exploration of a user's social connections in non-professional contexts. The more recent tool that we found was SocialVillage (Akbaritabar, Hezarjaribi & Jullien, 2015) that measures the social capital embedded in online social networks such as Facebook and Google Plus. This tool is a gamified social survey asking questions about an individual's network of friends and, based on their answers, the socio-economic positions of the user's friends are calculated.…”