PREDICTORS AND CONSEQUENCES OF DIFFERENTIATED PRACTICES ON SOCIAL NETWORK SITES

Abstract

Applying a typology of social network site (SNS) usage that takes into consideration the intensity with which people use such sites, this piece offers an empirical investigation of how users' social practices on SNSs differ and whether different levels of engagement have consequences for academic performance. We rely on a unique survey-based data set representing a diverse group of young adults to answer these questions. We find, not surprisingly, that the more intense users of such sites engage in more social activities on SNSs than those who spend less time on them and only use one such site. This finding holds in the realm of both stronger-tie activities and weaker-tie activities, that is, social practices involving one's close friends as well as less established ties. Our analyses suggest gender differences in level of engagement with SNS social practices. Women pursue more stronger-tie activities than men, such as interacting with existing friends. In contrast, women engage in fewer weaker-tie activities than men, such as developing new relationships on such sites. However, neither SNS usage intensity nor social practices performed on these sites is systematically related to students' academic performance, findings that challenge some previous claims to the contrary.

Keywords:

• social network sites
• intensity
• web use
• skills
• social practices
• online behaviour
• academic performance

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Jeremy Freese for helpful input at various stages of the project. They appreciate the generous support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that made this project possible. They are indebted to Waleeta Canon and the group of undergraduate and graduate research assistants in the Web Use Project lab during the 2006–07 academic year for data collection and data entry. The authors also thank the support of Ann Feldman, Tom Moss and Mary Case at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Notes

The Principle Investigator of this project is not now nor has ever been affiliated with this university in any way other than in the context of this study. Focus on this campus is not due to convenience; rather, it is the result of careful consideration about what type of student population would be most helpful in addressing questions of interest in the overall research project about differentiated Internet uses by user background.

The activities were listed in a different order than presented in Table 1 since this table is organized according to the activity categorization we developed based on analyses described later in this section.

While some survey traditions would suggest that it is a bad idea to mention specifics in such a question as that may prompt people, our pre-tests indicated that not mentioning examples such as Facebook would result in Facebook users often skipping this question altogether not realizing that it is an ‘SNS’, a term used more in the academic community at the time than among youth to refer to these services.

Note that the definitions of ‘weaker-tie activities’ versus ‘stronger-tie activities’ are not mutually exclusive, given that users may be ‘friended’ with close friends and casual acquaintances on SNSs, and more importantly, users can perform most of the social practices surveyed with both types of contacts. We contrast these two types of practices to distinguish the relatively different social distance in the context of the interactions.

In addition to running OLS regressions, we also ran ordinal logistic regression models on GPA and found that the results are robust. As such, we report the results of OLS regressions on GPA for ease of interpretation. We checked and there are no concerns of multi-collinearity to suggest that these analyses would not be appropriate. (The correlation matrix is available from the authors upon request.)

The survey included a question verifying students' attentiveness to the questionnaire. A small portion of students (3.4 per cent) was identified as not paying attention to question wording, suggesting that they were checking off responses randomly instead of replying to the substance of the questions. These students were excluded from the data and analyses presented here so as to minimize errors introduced through such respondents.