Class 15, Reading 2

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Reading

• 'Looking at', 'Looking up' or 'Keeping up with' People? Motives and Uses of Facebook
• Joinson

Outline

• Introduction
• User motivation and social networking sites
• Study 1: Exploratory Stage
• Participants
• Materials
• Results
• Study 2: Identifying Uses and Gratifications
• Item generation
• Participants
• Measures
• Results
• Interpretation of Factors and Scale of Development
• Inter-relations of uses and gratifications
• User demographics and uses and gratifications
• Predicting Facebook use
• Use of Facebook Privacy Settings and meeting new people
• Discussion
• Design Implications
• Limitations and Further research
• Conclusions

Notes

• Introduction
• examines motivations of Facebook users using a uses and gratifications framework
• 'uses and gratifications' - the 'how and why' of media use
• uses - motivations of specific uses
• gratifications - satisfaction gain from such use
• content gratification - based on the content of the media
• process gratification - based on the actual experience of using the media
• social environment gratification
• two-stage approach
• Stage 1 - Facebook users asked to generate lists of words or phrases that describe their users and gratification in an exploratory way
• Stage 2 - terms from Study 1 subjected to factor analysis in order to form grouped profiles of specific uses and gratifications
• Study 1: Exploratory Stage
• Participants
• 137 Facebook users
• 53 males, 88 females
• Average age: 26.3
• Materials (i.e., online survey)
• basic demographic questions (e.g., age, gender, occupation, location)
• measures of use of Facebook (e.g., time spent on site each week, number of friends linked on site, history of use)
• free text entry questions
• What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about what you enjoy most when using Facebook?
• What other words describe what you enjoy about using Facebook?
• Using single, easy-to-understand terms, what do you use Facebook for?
• What uses of Facebook are most important to you?
• Results
• Raters
• two raters clustered the descriptive items and phrases developed by Facebook users in response to the first question
• author discussed themes with raters, and named them accordingly
• Themes
• 'Keeping in touch' (52 mentions)
• Contacting friends who are away from home
• Chatting to people I otherwise would have lost contact with
• Passive contact, social surveillance (19 mentions)
• Virtual people-watching
• 'Re-acquiring lost contacts' (15 mentions)
• Reconnecting with people I've lost contact with
• Finding people you haven't seen in awhile
• 'Communication' (15 mentions)
• Being poked
• Private messages
• Writing on walls
• Photographs (11 mentions)
• Tagged in picture
• Posting pictures
• Sharing pictures
• Design related (4 mentions)
• Ease of use
• Perpetual contact (4 mentions)
• Seeing what people have put as their 'status'
• The continuous updates
• Seeing what my friends have been up to
• 'Making new contacts' (5 mentions)
• Talking to singles
• Getting new friends
• Joining groups
• Overview
• 'keeping in touch' received most mentions
• 'making new contacts' received least mentions
• Study 2: Identifying Uses and Gratifications
• Item generation
• participants' responses to items 2-4
• consisted of 46 'uses and gratifications' items derived from Study 1
• Participants
• 214 Facebook users
• 80 males, 161 females
• majority were full-time students
• Measures (i.e., online survey)
• same demographic and Facebook use measures from Study 1
• items related to their use of Facebook privacy settings
• did they change the default settings
• if so, to what degree (i.e., more private or more open)
• Likert scale
• 7-point scale used on 46 items
• metric was "How important are the following uses of Facebook to you personally?"
• scale was anchored from 1 (very unimportant) and 7 (very important)
• Results
• majority of users claimed to have changed the default privacy settings in Facebook
• most important uses of Facebook tended to be related to the 'social searching' and surveillance functions
• Interpretation of Factors and Scale Development
• factors
• Factor 1: Social connection
• contains items predominantly concerned with 'keeping in touch'
• clear focus on re-connecting with lost contacts and maintaining contact with existing friends
• Factor 2: Shared identities
• consists of three items:
• joining of groups
• organization of events
• meeting of 'like-minded people'
• akin to 'social browsing'
• seems to represent a 'shared identities' function
• Factor 3: Photographs
• related to the posting and viewing of photographs
• these activities within Facebook may fulfill a number of gratifications
• Factor 4: Content
• related to content within Facebook (e.g., applications, quizzes)
• relates to 'content gratification' identified in previous media research
• Factor 5: Social investigation
• contains items akin to both social searching and social browsing
• covers:
• the use of Facebook to meet or view new people
• finding out more about people who are met offline  
• Factor 6: Social networking surfing
• comprises of items related to a unique affordance of social networking sites: the ability to view other people's social networks and friends
• termed 'Social network surfing'
• closely related to a 'process gratification'
• Factor 7: Status updates
• related to the newsfeed and status updates within Facebook
• Inter-relations of uses and gratifications
• factors of users and gratifications correlated
• factors identified as related, in some cases relatively strongly 
• User demographics and uses and gratifications
• significant difference between males and females on scores across seven uses and gratification scales
• full-time students scored higher on social connection and photographs, and lower on shared identities, compared to full-time work for students
• age:
• correlated negatively with scores on social connections and photographs
• correlated positively with usage levels and number of friends
• negatively correlated with use of privacy settings
• Predicting Facebook use
• age was associated with:
• number of 'friends' (younger have more)
• amount of time users had been registered on the site
• frequency of their site visits (longer time registered and frequency of site visits associated with more friends)
• Use of Facebook Privacy Settings and meeting new people
• for users wishing to use Facebook to meet new people, privacy settings may be set at too stringent a level
• primary motivation for making one's profile less private is the desire to meet new people
• Discussion
• social networking sites pose number of challenges for HCI researchers and practitioners
• actual uses and gratifications of such sites not well understood
• this paper studies sites using 'uses and gratifications' framework
• previous research tended to focus on campus-based use of Facebook
• results of this paper support many of the conclusions from previous research
• 'keeping in touch' comprises two main functions
• surveillance function - to see what old contacts and friends are 'up to', how they look, and how they behave
• social capital building gratification - where Facebook is used to build, invest in, and maintain ties with distant friends and contacts
• 'social search' and 'social browsing' uses of Facebook closely related
• searching new people has same factor as researching offline contacts
• there's a difference between 'looking up' and 'looking at'
• only social investigation was associated with higher number of 'friends', not social network browsing
• increased score on content gratification scale was negatively related to number of 'friends'
• subset of users gain gratification through Facebook applications than through friend accrual
•  applications tend to rely on existing contacts to strengthen social ties rather than increase overall size of social network
• content gratification predicted amount of time spent on site
• 'keeping in touch' may refer to 'checking up on regularly'
• 'stickiness' (time spent) on site depends on content and applications use
• design implications
• social networking site designers should consider varied uses and gratifications reported by users
• not all users have same uses of social networking site
• people who have made their privacy settings more permissive are more likely to want to meet new people
• profile within Facebook more likely to become key self-presentation tool rather than simple way to 'keep in touch' with others

Comments

• During a lunch with Dr. Caverlee, he once commented that people focused too much on using Facebook as a self-promotion site.
• Even though this paper is two years old, the study still seems relevant today since the design features back in 2008 haven't radically changed that much on Facebook.
• I think the study conducted in this paper is of the interview type, as opposed to an ethnography.  It would have been interesting to see how the study would have fared as an ethnography paper, since it would reveal more fleshed-out details on Facebook users' behavior.