The role of culture in privacy management on social media among emerging adult children and their parents

ABSTRACT

This study extends Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory and prior privacy research to investigate the impact of culture on the way college-age children manage privacy boundaries with respect to their parents in social media. Differences in how American domestic students, Chinese international students who study in the U.S., and Chinese domestic students were examined via a survey administered at universities in both countries. Including international students afforded a unique opportunity to study privacy management during cultural socialization. Results reveal significant differences among the three populations in how they manage their privacy with regard to their parents in social media. For example, Chinese students disclose more information to their parents in social media and Chinese international students employ more strategies to protect their privacy than either Chinese or American domestic students. Implications of the results for future research on privacy management in social media among family members, and for social media platforms to help users better protect their privacy, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Privacy management
• disclosure
• social media
• families
• cultural differences

Acknowledgements

Laurent H. Wang is a graduate student and Miriam Metzger is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This manuscript was the first author’s undergraduate honors thesis in the Department of Communication at UCSB, advised by the second author. The data reported herein were collected under the support of a UCSB Undergraduate Research & Creative Activities (URCA) Grant. The authors would like to extend their gratitude to Drs. Jennifer Gibbs and Scott Reid for their invaluable feedback with early versions of this manuscript and for their dedication to the honors program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interviewees were asked “What privacy settings have you ever used to exclude your parents?” In response they discussed a range of privacy management strategies based on personal experiences. Ten strategies that were employed to regulate privacy were extracted: (1) limiting the breadth and/or depth of what you post on social media, (2) using an exclusive disclosure list to limit posts from parents, (3) blocking parents from seeing a post by or about you, (4) reviewing and deleting posts made about you by others, (5) using private messaging, (6) using a fake account (e.g., ‘finstagram’), (7) setting posts to be invisible after a period of time (e.g., 24 h), (8) lying about your activities, (9) using shorthand, codewords, pseudonyms, or slang language when discussing sensitive topics so parents won’t understand, and (10) ignoring comments or questions from parents in social media. Example quotes from the interviews are:

U.S. domestic participant #1: “Yes, by blocking her from my stories”

U.S. domestic participant #2: “I definitely do watch what I post, and make sure it’s not like too much something”

Chinese domestic participant #9: “I will avoid posting negative emotions and pretend to be positive and obedient to my parents”

Chinese international participant #6: “I won’t completely block them from my posts, but I do have settings such that some posts are only visible to my friends”

2 For uncertainty avoidance, the average for American domestic students was 5.04 (sd = .86), for Chinese international students the mean was 4.85 (sd = .83) and for Chinese domestic students the mean was 4.86 (sd = .92). Scores for power distance were 4.10 (sd = .79) for American domestic students, 3.88 (sd = .82) for Chinese international students, and 3.71 (sd = .72) for Chinese domestic students.