Adolescents' sense of community on myspace and facebook: a mixed‐methods approach

Abstract

Communities are foundational to the field of Community Psychology yet they are difficult to define and measure. Once viewed as social groups with ties to geographical locations, online communities interact free of physical or face‐to‐face contact. This cyberexistence makes the study of communities more challenging. Social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook and MySpace, are referred to as online communities; however, research has yet to explore whether these sites engender a psychological sense of community (PSC) for users. This study reanalyzes focus group and survey data from high school and college students to investigate whether uses of SNS demonstrate key components of PSC (i.e., membership, influence, immersion, shared emotional connection, and an integration and fulfillment of needs). This mixed‐method analysis synthesizes data through a top‐down (confirming PSC categories) and bottom‐up (identifying emergent patterns/themes) analytic procedure. Results suggest that typical adolescent uses of SNS represent networked individualism, rather than online communities. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Social Networking and the Social and Emotional Wellbeing of Adolescents in Australia

“…Qualitative research has found that young people will sometimes ask their friends to post certain comments on their profile as a means to making others believe something to be true, to create jealousy, and/or to provoke flirtation (Reich, 2010).…”

“…High school students have reported that social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace allow them to stay in touch with friends who do not live nearby, and reconnect to those with whom they have lost contact (Lenhart & Madden, 2007;Reich, 2010) is common for teens to use networking sites as a means to organize plans with friends (Boyd & Ellison, 2008;Lenhart & Madden, 2007) and it provides a place for youth to find opportunities, such as volunteering in the community (AAP, 2011).…”

Twitter City and Facebook Village: teenage girls' personas and experiences influenced by choice architecture in social networking sites

“…The only other items in a news feed are sponsored links, or updates from pages (usually businesses or fan pages). It is this magnifying glass focus on events within a social circle which results in the drama that young people complain of on Facebook (Pew, 2013) and in this research due to asynchronous commenting and misunderstanding (Reich, 2010). The contrast between outward and inward focus is shown in the positive experiences results in RQ1: though Facebook and Twitter produce similar results for fun, friendly and confidence-building, Twitter is judged to be more interesting.…”

Who Am I on Facebook? Usage and Motivation Through User Eyes

“…In general, the use of SNS (social networking sites) has been associated with student social connectivity (Reich, 2010) even with the vast number of different users worldwide. Consequently, most research is focused on understanding what kinds of activities students perform on network sites and what motivates them in such.…”