Online and offline social networks: Use of social networking sites by emerging adults

Abstract

Social networking sites (e.g., MySpace and Facebook) are popular online communication forms among adolescents and emerging adults. Yet little is known about young people's activities on these sites and how their networks of “friends” relate to their other online (e.g., instant messaging) and offline networks. In this study, college students responded, in person and online, to questions about their online activities and closest friends in three contexts: social networking sites, instant messaging, and face-to-face. Results showed that participants often used the Internet, especially social networking sites, to connect and reconnect with friends and family members. Hence, there was overlap between participants' online and offline networks. However, the overlap was imperfect; the pattern suggested that emerging adults may use different online contexts to strengthen different aspects of their offline connections. Information from this survey is relevant to concerns about young people's life online.

Introduction

Over the past decade, the communication uses of the Internet have become a very important part of young people's lives (e.g., Gemmill and Peterson, 2006, Jones, 2002, Lenhart and Madden, 2007, Subrahmanyam and Greenfield, 2008). Social networking sites are the latest online communication tool that allows users to create a public or semi-public profile, create and view their own as well as other users' online social networks (boyd & Ellison, 2007a), and interact with people in their networks. Sites such as MySpace and Facebook have over 100 million users between them, many of them adolescents and emerging adults. Although research on young people's use of social networking sites is emerging (e.g., boyd and Ellison, 2007b, Ellison et al., 2007, Valkenburg et al., 2006), questions remain regarding exactly what young people do on these sites, whom they interact with on them, and how their social networking site use relates to their other online (such as instant messaging) and offline activities. Furthermore, because of the potential to interact with known others as well as meet and befriend strangers on these sites, it is important to study the nature of their online social networks in order to get an understanding of how such online communication relates to young people's development. The goals of the present study were to explore emerging adults' use of social networking sites for communication and examine the relation between their online and offline social networks.

The communication forums of the Internet are many and varied and include applications such as instant messaging, email, and chat rooms as well as Internet sites such as blogs, social networking sites, photo and video sharing sites such as YouTube, and virtual reality environments such as Second Life. Adolescents (Boneva et al., 2006, Gross, 2004) and young adults in college (Clark et al., 2004, Gemmill and Peterson, 2006, Jones, 2002) are heavy users of the Internet relative to the general population, and use it extensively for communication with peers.

To understand the role of online communication in young people's development we turn to the theoretical proposal that users of interactive online forums such as chat rooms, blogs, and social networking sites are co-constructing their online environments (Subrahmanyam and Greenfield, 2008, Subrahmanyam et al., 2006). A major implication of the co-construction model is that online and offline worlds are psychologically connected. Consequently, we expect that users bring people and issues from their offline worlds into their online ones. This proposal is in contrast to the view that the Internet allows users to present online selves that are separate and different from their offline ones (e.g., Byam, 1995, McKenna and Bargh, 2000, Turkle, 1995). Developmental research on young people's online behavior supports the claim that online and offline worlds may indeed be connected.

Research suggests that adolescents use instant messaging mainly to communicate with offline friends about events in school, gossip, and the like (Boneva et al., 2006, Gross et al., 2002). In another study of preadolescent and adolescent youth in the Netherlands, 80% reported using the Internet to maintain existing friendship networks (Valkenburg & Peter, 2007). There is also a growing body of research regarding cyber bullying that has highlighted the connections between online and offline worlds. For example, Ybarra, Mitchell, Wolak, and Finkelhor (2006) found that nearly half of the adolescent Internet users in their study knew the online bully in person before the cyber bullying incident occurred. With regard to social networking sites, teens, particularly girls, reported using the sites to keep in contact with peers from their offline lives, either to make plans with friends that they see often or to keep in touch with friends they rarely see (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). The girls in this study also reported using social networking sites to reinforce pre-existing friendships whereas boys reported using them to flirt and make new friends.

Adolescents' developmental concerns include formulating identity, adjusting to sexuality, and establishing intimate relations with peers and romantic partners (Brown, 2004, Erikson, 1959, Weinstein and Rosen, 1991), and recent research indicates that they use online contexts in the service of these important concerns. Two studies of online teen chat rooms that analyzed 12,000 utterances from 1100 participants found that identity presentation (Subrahmanyam et al., 2006), partner selection (Šmahel & Subrahmanyam, 2007), and sexual comments (Subrahmanyam et al., 2006) were the most frequent kinds of utterances in chat rooms. A qualitative study showed that American as well as Austrian teenagers used online chat rooms for the development of their gender and ethnic identity (Waechter, 2005, Waechter, 2006). A similar mirroring of adolescent developmental issues was found in a study of another online forum, weblogs that were written by adolescents (Subrahmanyam, Garcia, Harsono, Lin, & Lipana, in press). Adolescent bloggers adopted usernames and userpictures for self-presentation and used their blog entries for self-disclosure about their peers and everyday life. They also used their blog entries to create narratives about themselves and to reflect about the people and events in their lives. Viewing users' online worlds as psychologically continuous with their offline ones enables us to start teasing apart the relation between online communication and development. Much of the research in support of this view has been done on adolescents, and it is an open question whether such connectedness is present among emerging adults who are in college.

Prior studies as well as recent anecdotal reports indicate that online and offline contexts may be connected among emerging adults as well. Anderson (2001) suggested that among college students, excessive Internet use might be related to developmental issues such as establishing new relationships and identity formation. In a longitudinal study of undergraduate Japanese students' face-to-face (FTF) social networks and mobile/cell phone text message (MPTM) mediated social networks, Igarashi, Takai, and Yoshida (2005) reported that at two points during the year, there was mutuality between the two networks: 94% of the time at Time 1 and 98% of the time at Time 2, persons nominated as a friend in participants' MPTM social networks were also found on their FTF social networks. Analysis of measures of relationship intimacy led Igarashi et al. to conclude that even at the beginning of the academic year, participants used MPTM to communicate with intimate FTF friends.

Another indication that emerging adults' online and offline worlds are connected comes from a qualitative analysis of autobiographical essays written by young adult college students (Mcmillan & Morrison, 2008). The participants in this study did not use the Internet for identity exploration but instead used it to solidify their offline identities. Further, the authors concluded that participants used their online virtual communities to sustain their “real” communities that existed offline, such as using online tools to plan social events with their offline friends. Also relevant is a recent Los Angeles Times report that a prolific 24-year-old graffiti tagger called “Buket” was arrested after the police began investigating him when videos of his vandalism were posted on YouTube and tagger-related blogs (Blankstein, 2008). The point here is that the tagger, a university graduate with an art degree, used the online context to showcase his offline exploits. Next, we present the unique developmental challenges that emerging adults face, followed by research relevant to the question of connectedness in the context of social networking sites, the focus of this paper.

Arnett (2004) coined the term emerging adulthood to capture the unique transitional period in human development that occurs between late adolescence and young adulthood in cultural contexts where marriage and parenthood are delayed until the late twenties or beyond. According to him, it is a “time of exploration and instability, a self-focused age, and an age of possibilities” (p. 21). Two important developmental challenges faced by emerging adults include that of identity achievement and the development of intimacy. Although the search for identity begins during adolescence (Erikson, 1959, Kroger, 2003), emerging adults, particularly those in the western world, are still grappling with some aspects of their identities, such as their vocational/career, religious, and ethnic identities (Cote, 2006). In addition, they seek to establish intimacy via interconnections with friends and romantic partners, as well as relatives and family members. Non-romantic interconnections with others are the developmental concern that is the focus of this paper. Friends are important to emerging adults, particularly for those not in a romantic relationship (Kalmijn, 2003). Research suggests that self-disclosure is an important component of emerging adults' feelings of intimacy in friendships and intimate behaviors with friends include “emotional support, trust and loyalty, sharing activities, and offers of instrumental support” (Radmacher & Azmitia, 2006, p. 429). There is also evidence that support from such intimate relationships may serve as a buffer against stress for college students (Cohen & Hoberman, 1983). Students appear to use technology to obtain social support (LaRose, Eastin, & Gregg, 2001), and greater use of online communication tools such as email and chat room/instant messaging is related to reduced depressive symptoms (Morgan & Cotten, 2003). Thus, the evidence to date indicates that like adolescents, emerging adults may also use online communication tools in the service of important offline issues, such as the need for interconnections with others and raises the possibility that their online and offline social networks overlap.

Research on social networking sites is beginning to accumulate (boyd & Ellison, 2007b) and indicate that they may be used to bridge online and offline social networks (see boyd & Ellison, 2007a for a review of prior work on this issue). Relevant to us is research that has examined college students' use of social networking sites to form and maintain interconnections with their offline peers. For instance, in a survey of all incoming first year students at a major Midwestern university, Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield (2007) found that students most often used Facebook for social purposes — to stay in touch with their friends from high school as well as to form interconnections with people they had met offline such as in their dormitories or in class. Similarly Ellison et al. (2007) found that college students used Facebook to maintain or bolster existing offline connections rather than to form new relationships. Such ties appear to have some positive benefits and greater Facebook use was associated with more perceived social capital. Facebook use was related to all three kinds of perceived social capital — bridging social capital, which consists of the resources that stem from one's weaker ties, bonding social capital, which consists of the resources that stem from one's more intimate ties, and maintained social capital, which consists of the resources that stem from one's prior ties.

Although these studies are beginning to show that emerging adults use social networking sites to connect with the people in their offline worlds, questions remain as to how such use is integrated into their offline lives. For instance, what do emerging adults do on social networking sites and what are their reasons for using these sites? What is the nature of their network of friends on social networking sites and how do they decide whom to add or remove from their online network? What are the perceived effects of these online interconnections on their relationships? Finally, it is important to note that the finding that emerging adults use social networking sites to interconnect with people from their offline lives is based on self-reports from participants. To date no study has asked users to list people from their face-to-face and social networking site networks and compared them. As of yet, we do not know the actual relation between college students' networks on social networking sites and their other online (e.g., instant messaging) as well as offline networks — are the persons they interact with frequently on social networking sites the same as those that they interact with frequently in face-to-face contexts as well as in another online context, instant messaging, or are they different?

The purpose of the study was to determine what emerging adults do online, whom they interact with in cyberspace, and how these online interactions relate to their offline relationships. Specifically, we expected to find that emerging adults, like many adolescents, are daily users of the Internet and that their preferred uses would be social activities (e.g., participants would be more likely to spend time emailing and on social networking sites than surfing the web or downloading music). In addition to expecting high use of social networking sites, we anticipated that the most popular activities on these sites would be social in nature as well (e.g., reading and posting comments would be more popular than checking out music links or joining new groups). Based on our thesis that emerging adults' online and offline worlds are connected, we predicted that there would be a high degree of overlap between users' top online and offline friends. Although we expected overlap between online and offline networks, we predicted that more intensive users of the Internet would have less overlap between their online and offline networks. In summary, we predicted that emerging adults would use social networking sites to promote social interaction and reinforce important offline relationships, demonstrating that for them, technology is a tool for supporting interpersonal connections.

We addressed the above questions using a survey study of emerging adults in a large urban university. In order to determine what emerging adults did online, how much time they spent on various online activities, especially on social networking sites, and how their online and offline social networks related to one another, we used an offline paper-and-pencil survey as well as an online survey to ask participants general questions about themselves, their offline and online activities, and their social networking site use. In addition, they were asked more detailed questions regarding their social networking site use, such as their reasons for having a profile, their frequent activities on social networking sites, how they decide to add or delete friends, and their perceptions about the effects of their social networking site use on their relationships. Participants who did not use social networking sites were asked whether they perceived any effects on themselves because they do not use these sites. Participants were also asked for the names of the 10 people/friends that they interacted with the most in face-to-face-settings, in instant messaging, and on social networking sites. Contingency tables (2 × 2 × 2) were then formed for each person to assess the degree of overlap between users' online (instant messaging and social networking) and offline (face-to-face) networks.

A two-step procedure was adopted with the offline and online survey. Participants first completed the paper-and-pencil survey in the laboratory, at which point they provided their email address. They were then sent an email with a link to the online survey, and were asked to complete it while viewing their social networking profile and instant messaging buddy list. Methodologically, such a two-step process has some advantages. Using an online survey enabled participants to answer detailed questions about their social networking site/instant messaging use by checking their profiles online instead of relying on their memory or making incorrect estimations, a problem encountered in previous survey studies of online activity (Subrahmanyam & Lin, 2007). The online survey also asked participants specific questions about their time use that day — how much time they spent offline, online, and on social networking sites as well as the activities that they had done on a social networking site that day. Using two different survey formats allowed us to ask respondents what they usually do online and what they actually did on a particular day. This reduced potential errors in participant's recollection of online behaviors while offline and provided confirmation of certain aspects of respondent's identity such as gender and the fact that they were emerging adults in college. Thus, we were able to collect information about participants' online behavior while they were on the Internet, but without many of the uncertainties that often accompany anonymous online surveys.