Collaboration, when it works, optimizes the contributions of individuals, often resulting in better decisions, outcomes, and experiences than individuals working alone. Social network sites (SNSs) offer new opportunities for collaboration due to their social and technical affordances. SNS profiles enable the display of identity information, which can act as a social lubricant and help individuals initiate conversations and find common ground. Within SNSs, contact lists lower the transaction costs associated with interaction. Finally, SNSs enable access to a larger pool of individuals (and their wider and more diverse knowledge base) while also providing a context in which social capital processes serve as a mechanism for encouraging collaboration, advice-giving and information-sharing. This project will develop and test a model of SNS-enabled collaboration motivated by the following research questions: What forms of collaboration are enabled by SNSs? How do the features of SNSs affect these processes? Who uses these sites to collaborate and why?
This study will examine SNS-facilitated collaborative instances using quantitative and qualitative data to provide insight into users motivations, perceptions, and conceptual frameworks. First, we will examine examples of ad-hoc collaboration among college undergraduates to explore how relationship initiation and collaboration occur, both in SNS and face-to-face contexts. Second, aggregate behavioral patterns on Facebook will be analyzed to discover and investigate modes of collaboration on the site.
Social network sites and social media have played an increasingly important role in the lives of Americans over the last few years. While popular media reports typically focus on negative outcomes, and critics of social media point to the potential banality of these new information systems, we see increasing evidence that people are able to use social computing systems like Facebook and Twitter to do important tasks such as exchange information and access social support. In order to understand the motivations for and outcomes of co-opting social media for addressing information and support needs, we conducted a series of interviews, surveys, and analyses of behavioral data to examine the different ways people use social media to tap into their social networks, engage in ad-hoc collaborative activities, and achieve their social, relational, and organizational goals. We have interviewed and surveyed college students as well as adult samples to understand what motivates people to ask for help and to respond to others’ requests. We have also focused on specific kinds of people, such as parents of young children, to understand how online tools might help these individuals ask their social networks questions about child raising. Over the lifetime of this project, one consistent theme we’ve pursued in our published work is examining the relationship between use of social network sites such as Facebook and a sociological concept known as social capital. Social capital describes the benefits that a person can derive from being connected to a variety of other people, and speaks to direct benefits like loans or emotional support as well as more indirect benefits like exposure to new information or diverse worldviews. Previous research has shown that social capital is essential to a variety of important functions in society, and has been associated with better outcomes in the areas of health, crime, work productivity, and other core social issues. With this project, we have researched how people use social network sites to help foster their social capital in different ways and have explored how that is mediated by such essential related issues like the desire for privacy, the need to groom (or maintain) one’s social relationships, or the composition of one’s social network. This work identifies activities that are associated with higher social capital perceptions. For instance, one of the keys to successful outcomes for using social network sites and social media is how actively they are used: people who just passively consume content in social media may not experience the same benefits as people who actively engage with their connections on the site by doing activities such as answering questions. Working directly with Facebook research scientists, we found that a significant portion of original posts on Facebook are related to requests for assistance of some kind. We also find that people who ask for help tend to report higher social capital, and that posts that ask for help receive more comments in a shorter period of time than posts that are not seeking a response. In short, this work highlights some of the positive outcomes of social media use and provides a roadmap for individuals and companies who wish to access these benefits. With this funding, we have published 18 peer-reviewed research papers in high-impact journals and conference proceedings. Multiple PhD students have been supported, all of whom have been co-authors on papers resulting from the grant. This work has developed a framework for theorizing the social capital implications of social network site use and has introduced new measures and concepts into the scholarly discourse about online interaction processes and their implications for individuals, communities, and society as a whole.
