Motives and Uses of Facebook

Facebook, being the most popular social networking site in the world [1], gets millions of interactions on daily bases. This generates a lot of interesting topics to be explored by CHI researchers. In his paper, Adam N. Joinson (2008) explores people’s motivation and uses of Facebook. The research was done through two studies. In the first study users were asked series of demographic questions, alongside overall usage statistics and also what they like about Facebook. Survey revealed that people use Facebook to ‘keep in touch’ with the people they know already, rather than making new contacts. Second study used gratifications derived from the first study and put them onto a Likert scale. They also included some questions about privacy settings on Facebook, do get some sense of how open people’s profiles are. Study revealed that participants mainly use Facebook for ‘social searching’ and surveillance function. Similarly with the first study people tended to use the site maintain contacts with old friends.

Rest of the paper analyses the results in more depth and describes the development of factors and scales. Overall seven exploratory factors were developed —  for social connections, shared identities, photographs, content, social investigation, social network surfing and status updates — and then analysed for correlations between them to find out. The findings — like young and unemployed people spent more time on Facebook and people who want to get new acquaintances have looser privacy settings  were quite obvious, but they also provided statistical proof for it.

As I was reading this paper I couldn’t help myself questioning the validity of the data. Participants were assessing their time on the site themselves and also people’s interpretation of the gratifications may differ from person to person. Facebook has grown a lot since Joinson’s paper was published and I would like to see this study repeated on a larger scale and by using the Facebook API. Looking around the web I found such kind of research done by T. Spiliotopoulos and I. Oakley (2013) [2]. They included all the factors from Joinson’s study and added three more factors which influenced the motives of Facebook use. The found differences in five items which did not load clearly and in factor seven, because of its ambiguity.

The paper I found for this week is called  “I regretted the minute I pressed share”: a qualitative study of regrets on Facebook which investigates regrets associated with users’ posts on Facebook.

1. http://www.alexa.com/topsites

2.  Spiliotopoulos, T. and Oakley, I. 2013. Understanding Motivations for Facebook Use: Usage Metrics, Network Structure, and Privacy. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI ’13. ACM, 3287 – 3296. DOI = http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466449.