The Sources of Emotional and Infomational Support on Social Networking Sites 1
Peng Huang, 2Pin Luarn, 3Yu-Ping Chiu, 4Jen-Chieh Yang
1
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology,
[email protected] 2
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology,
[email protected],
3
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology,
[email protected]
4
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology,
[email protected]
Abstract The purpose of this study is to clarify the sources of emotional and informational support on Facebook, and to analyze the possible principle behind the algorithm by the concept of social support. This study tries to develop the program to access interaction records and the online questionnaire on Facebook to analyze the support between their social interactions. The results show that strong tie individuals have obviously higher frequency of clicking like, giving comments and messages on Facebook than weak tie individuals. Also, females have obviously higher interaction than males. However, the results of the H3 show that the interaction between the same or opposite gender has no significant difference on Facebook. We assume that is because the interaction of male are seldom, which lower the effect of the emotional and informational support degree between the interaction of the same gender.
Keywords: Facebook, emotional support, informational support, tie strength, gender 1. Introduction The Appearance of Social Network Service (SNS) changes the form of communication from centralization and broadcasting into collaboration and sharing, it also changes the idea of tribe in the community, a deliberative community with diversity, which enables individuals to maintain and develop relationships with each other [1-2]. For instance, Facebook as a main stream website that change the Internet industry, which has 800 million users who stay on that over 7 hours per month, everyone want to figure out the reasons that make users stay on that. This kind of social networking site developed to encourage interpersonal connections and increasing the availability of social support through information sharing, guidance, and the friendships developed with other members [3]. Recommendation mechanism in the SNS malfunctions the traditional marketing method and search engine, by not only the huge community and interaction between users, but replaces the broadcasting marketing message into reliable information source originates from the consumers [4]. However, SNSs did not provide their related algorithm about the user's relationship and interaction, which cause the enterprises and marketing executers lost in a mist, unable to clarify their strategies and effect to influence consumers. Through all kinds of interaction on Facebook, users get emotional and informational support in different ways, but the actual method,
operation and effect of the communication remains unknown. Liang et al. [5] also suggested that better social support can lead to better relationship quality, which in turn can result in higher customer loyalty. Thus, it is important to clarify the role of social support in social network site to help businesses develop and improve their social media marketing strategy. This study discusses the questions above through tie strength and gender. Researches in the past pointed out the high level of tie strength between individuals, the more support they respond to each other [6-7]. However, is there be the same in SNSs, or SNSs will increase the capability to offer the emotional and informational support between the weak ties? Besides, there are also discussed about the gender as a factor of willingness of support. Kendler, Myers and Prescott [8] mentioned that female have a broader social network and more emotionally involved in those networks, so they are also more sensitive to those supports and might be disappointed if they do not receive feedback as they want. As a result, there should be discrepancy of emotional and informational support between male and female. This study tries to figure out these concepts to explain the emotional and informational support on Facebook. The results provide the enterprises and marketing executers to clarify their strategies and effect to influence consumers.
2. Literature Review 2.1 Social support: emotional and informational support Social support is defined as the perception or experience that one is loved and cared for, esteemed and valued, and part of a social network of mutual assistance and obligations [9]. Individuals can provide social support from verbal and nonverbal messages conveying emotion, information, or referral, which is contributed to mute the experience of stress, enhance well-being, reduce the severity of illness, and speed recovery from health disorders when they do occur [10-11]. Strong social support makes a user feel connected to friends as well as building trust with those friends [12-13], which will encourage users to share shopping information, product knowledge, or purchasing experiences with their friends [5]. The development of Internet, social support is being exchanged via computer-mediated communication, in relatively large networks among people who do not know each other and do not communicate face-to-face (FtF) [14]. Unlike FtF support relationships, most computer-mediated communication (CMC) support exchanges begin by discussing the topic of concern, immediately and often in very personal terms. Liang et al. [5] and Obst and Stafurik [3] also claimed that social support has been found to be a major social value that Internet users can obtain from an online community. Online social support that may help social media users usually is intangible in nature, including information support and emotional support [10, 15]. Information support occurs when an individual provide messages that could help another to understand a stressful event better and to ascertain what resources and coping strategies may be needed to deal with it [16]. Emotional support refers to providing messages that involve emotional concerns, such as caring, understanding, or empathy to another individual and reassuring the person that he or she is a
valuable person who is cared about [16]. In fact, Liang et al. [5] and Cheshire [17] suggested that social networking site is a platform for users to exchange support with one another. If a user receives support from friends in a social networking site, the user may be feeling obligated to return a similar favor. That is, through all kinds of interaction on Facebook, users can get social support in different ways, such as like, comment or message. "Like", as the most popular interaction on Facebook, can be treated as an emotional support behavior. It provides warmth and nurturance to another individual and reassuring the person that he or she is a valuable person who is cared about. On the other hand, comment and message individuals send to each other can help to create and reinforce social ties and friendships, which can regard as informational support. Thus, this study tries to clarify these forms of social support on Facebook to verify the supportive behavior.
2.2 The effect of the tie strength towards the emotional and informational support Tie strength is an important idea in the social network analysis, it means the quantity we calculate and quality we described [18]. Granovetter [6] pointed out tie strength can be defined as a combination of the amount of time, emotional intensity, intimacy and reciprocal services, every factor is independent but inner correlated. In a brief, tie is a positive and symmetrical relationship, and there are two kinds of it, strong tie and weak tie. Strong tie means the friend you trust and with a close and overlapping social circle [6]. Strong tie provides a powerful social support and that not only improves personal mental health [19], but also unites individuals to overcome crisis [8]. Weak tie, loose acquaintances, is not only conducive to arouse creative idea and finding a job, but also enliven the knowledge communication in the group [20]. Nonverbal messages that convey emotion, information, or referral, to help reduce one’s uncertainty or stress are all belong to the behavior of social support. According to the tie strength point of view, this study claims that the stronger of the tie, the stronger of emotional and informational support, like, comment and message individuals send to each other. Then, we bring up the hypotheses as below: H1: Strong tie individuals send higher emotional and informational support to each other. H1a: Strong tie individuals have obvious higher frequency of like on Facebook than weak tie. H1b: Strong tie individuals have obvious higher frequency of comment on Facebook than weak tie. H1c: Strong tie individuals have obvious higher frequency of message on Facebook than weak tie.
2.3 The effect of gender in emotional and informational support Cook [21] suggested that men are independent and self-confident who do not rely much on others. In dealing with adversity, men may turn to their network, but interactions are likely to focus on shared activities or distractions [27]. Thus, they presumably do not seek emotional and informational support as often as women do, and may not receive support very often. On the other hand, the characteristics of women are nurturant and affiliated, so they have a desire to provide support to others. They are more likely to seek and receive emotional support than other forms of support, and also more likely to seek and receive emotional support than men [28].
Briefly, women are more sensitive to the ways others looking at them, they tend to adjust themselves to ensure a smooth and harmonious interaction [26], intimacy, connectivity and support [25]. Women might get depressed if they do not receive feedback from others, so, they are more willing to change their behavior to shape a nice and friendly impression [26]. On the basis of our theorizing, this study offers the hypotheses as below: H2: Females send higher emotional and informational support to each other on Facebook. H2a: Females have obvious higher frequency of like on Facebook than males. H2b: Females have obvious higher frequency of comment on Facebook than males. H2c: Females have obvious higher frequency of message on Facebook than males. The prior study suggested that people tend to seek out friends with same gender for both emotional and tangible support [27], especially for women. Reevy and Maslach [23] claimed that women may be instilled with a general trust in women, a trust that women want to and are competent to, solve a range of problems for other people. That is, people see same gender persons as approachable and useful support providers. Thus, this study claims the hypotheses as below: H3: Individuals with the same gender send higher emotional and informational support to each other. H3a: Individuals with the same gender have higher frequency of like on Facebook than the opposite gender. H3b: Individuals with the same gender have higher frequency of comment on Facebook than the opposite gender. H3c: Individuals with the same gender have higher frequency of message on Facebook than the opposite gender.
3. Methods 3.1 Procedure In order to collect enough information to modeling the tie strength in SNS, this study chose Facebook.com to be our sample social network dataset for its rich active users and interaction records. The purpose of the study was to classify user interaction records and user profile on Facebook into categories that scholars believe can be used to measure the tie strength, and furthermore, to integrate with participants’ opinion by requesting participants to rate the strength of their Facebook friendships. The questionnaire has six questions to assess their friendship, to guide participant the questionnaire also include photos of the friend. There are 45 participants join the test and result in 1523 relationship data. The program is developed to operate on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, Apache and MySQL which provided by AppServ 2.5.9 installer package, use PHP and JavaScript as programming language. For accessing social networking data on Facebook application developing platform, the program use Facebook SDK to connect with participant’s Facebook account and request their permission to access basic information and interaction records on Facebook. Besides the user basic information that provide by default, including id, name, picture, gender, and their locale, for valuating tie strength the program need to request several permissions
from participant. In case of people have much more weak ties than strong ties, if we just show a friend list to valuate at random, there should be lots of weak tie friends and only a few strong tie friends. This study separates every participant’s friends into two lists to avoid this situation, one is exactly random friend list, and another one base on the frequency of interaction (includes like, comment and message) recently to set priority. Thus, random and recent-interacted friends will show in order of odd and even number. The participant does not know about this setting and just keep valuating their tie strength with the friend show on the page. Furthermore, the program accessed the interaction record in the past three months of the participant in Facebook database as a standard to analyze and compare with the data made by participants from the valuation.
3.2 Measurement of tie strength and interaction information accessing. As the valuation mentioned above, the program includes a page that lets the volunteer to shift a bar on a dragging slider to change the strength and estimate the friendship between the participant and his/her friends. Tie strength measurement base on the way claimed by Gilbert and Karahalios [28], asking the volunteer the question as below, "How strong is your relationship with this person? ", which set a 0 to 100 degrees standard to divide the difference from strong tie and weak tie. Over the 50 is subordinate to strong tie, and under 50 is categorized to weak tie. On interaction information accessing, the program will access the information such like profile, education, philosophy, habit, and interaction records like likes, comments, events, messages, mutual friends, groups and pages. We can also confirm the gender between volunteers and their friends to analysis their behavior of interacting. The study uses t-test to analyze the influence of emotional and informational support of tie strength and gender difference on Facebook.
4. Results Hypothesis 1 posited that strong tie individuals send higher emotional and informational support to each other. This study discussed the concept of support from the frequency of like, comment and message on Facebook. Independent sample t-tests were conducted and found the support for H1. The results suggested that strong tie individuals have obvious higher frequency of like (M=14.17; p
