Contextual social capital: linking the contexts of social media use to its outcomes

ABSTRACT

The established link between social media use and social capital reflects the understanding that these media are useful for establishing and maintaining relationships. Yet, social media are frequently used for other purposes, such as entertainment, information seeking, and companionship. Using a uses and gratifications approach, this study explores how contexts of social media use intersect with social capital. From data gathered in an online survey of approximately 350 social media users, multiple multivariate regression analysis was used to analyze the contributions that individual contexts of social media use make on bridging, bonding, and maintained social capital. This analysis demonstrates that while everyday instrumental communication is a primary contributor to the accrual of all forms of social capital, the use of social media use to express care and concern for others and for entertainment is also important to social capital outcomes. These findings underscore the importance of considering context to understand the effects of social media use.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• social capital
• uses and gratifications

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kelly Quinn (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago) is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include an interdisciplinary focus on new media and its intersection with the life course, social capital, friendship, and privacy. [email: [email protected]]

ORCID

Kelly Quinn http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9922-823X

Notes

1. It should be noted that studies in public health have identified contextual social capital as that which is accrued to the individual from the structural features of a community, state, or nation (e.g. Engström, Mattsson, Järleborg, & Hallqvist, 2008; Poortinga, 2006); in other words, individuals residing in an area with a specific context are equally exposed to factors such as welfare policies and community trust, but the effects of these factors on health may vary between different individuals. This study similarly refers to the contexts under which social capital may be generated; however, as media use is undertaken at the level of the individual, contextual social capital here only reflects that which is experienced and accrued at the level of the individual.

2. Bridging, Bonding, and Maintained Social Capital scales were verified using principal components extraction as recent work has identified that items may not represent distinct constructs (Appel et al., 2014). The resulting pattern matrix is summarized in Appendix A.