Connecting in the Twitterverse: Using Twitter to satisfy unmet belonging needs

ABSTRACT

The current study explored how social media can satisfy unmet needs for belonging. We predicted that, of those who experience chronic ostracism (feeling excluded and ignored frequently), people high in need to belong would utilize Twitter to satisfy their unmet belonging needs more than those low in need to belong. Specifically, individuals high in need to belong and chronic ostracism should use Twitter to form and maintain parasocial relationships (one-sided relationships with media figures). Participants (n = 315) completed a survey assessing their chronic ostracism experiences, dispositional need to belong, and Twitter behavior, particularly regarding potential parasocial relationship targets (n = 229). As expected, when participants reported experiencing high rates of chronic ostracism, participants high in need to belong used Twitter more than those low in need to belong, particularly following more parasocial relationship targets. Thus, maintaining parasocial relationships on Twitter may be an effective way to satisfy unmet belonging needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• ostracism
• parasocial relationships
• Social media

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at http://osf.io/gm5j6

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at http://osf.io/gm5j6

Notes

1. Degrees of freedom vary throughout the analyses due to missing data.

2. Our materials and data are available on the Open Science Framework: http://osf.io/gm5j6.

3. We examined whether there were outliers (3 standard deviations from the mean) on frequency of logging in, the amount of PSR targets followed, or motives. There were three outliers on only the amount of PSR targets followed. Results with and without the outliers remained similar, so we retained the outliers in our reported analyses.

4. We examined our data for skewness and kurtosis and found that only the amount of PSR targets followed variable exceeded the skew and kurtosis recommendations (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2013). We report analyses with the log-transformed variable which reduces skew and kurtosis below recommended levels (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2013).