Personal ties, group ties and latent ties: connecting network size to diversity and trust in the mobile social network WeChat

ABSTRACT

This study examines whether and how network size is associated with diversity and trust in the mobile SNS context. Online survey data (N = 327) on Chinese WeChat users reveal that both personal network size and extended network size are positively related to the diversity of people’s social networks. We believe the explanation for these findings may be that the affordances of WeChat provide users opportunities to accumulate a wide spectrum of relations ranging from strong ties, weak ties to latent ties and thus a larger network can enable them to access to more diverse resources. We also find that extended network size is negatively related to people’s trust in their WeChat contacts. We argue that the increasing size of the extended network may reduce familiarity, certainty and accountability that assumed to be prerequisites of trust.

KEYWORDS:

• WeChat
• social capital
• diversity
• mobile social media
• network size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Cuihua Shen is an associate professor at the Department of Communication, University of California, Davis. Her research interests include social networks, digital media, and computational communication.

He Gong is an associate professor at the Department of Advertising, School of Journalism and Communication, Xiamen University. Her research interests include public relations, health communication, and social media.

Notes

1 Besides a WeChat handle, people could also find and connect others using their QQ account, cellphone number, or a QR code. Therefore, all these alternatives require a prior connection.

2 An alternative is through a QR code obtained from other channels (i.e., an online forum).

3 In testing H2 and H3, we also added trust and network diversity as controls, respectively, and neither produced significant results so we dropped them in the final models.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Fujian Province Soft Science Program under Grant No. 2018R0093 to He Gong.