ISOJ 2008

1. Lessons from :
Social Network Sites and College Students’ Social Capital
Sebastián Valenzuela
Namsu Park
Kerk F. Kee
9th International Symposium on Online Journalism
Austin, Texas
April 2008

2. Who we are?

3. • Moral panic! Unsafe disclosure of
information, cyberbullying,
addiction, risky behavior,
dangerous communities...
• Is there social capital and
civic/political engagement in
Facebook?
• If so, what can journalists learn
from SNS?
• Random web survey of college
students across Texas (n = 2,603)
Why care?

4. What are we talking about?
• Intensity of Facebook use:
– # of contacts
– Time and frequency
– Emotional attachment
• Social Capital in 3-D:
– Intrapersonal dimension: life satisfaction
– Interpersonal dimension: social trust
– Behavioral dimension: civic and political
participation

5. The kids are alright
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Intensity of
Facebook Use
Intensity of
Facebook
Groups Use
Life
Satisfaction
Social Trust Civic
Engagement
Political
Engagement
Low Moderate High

6. What we found
• Hierarchical multiple regressions, controlling for
gender, age, year in school, race/ethcnicity,
parental education, residency.
• Comparing intense FB users to light FB users:
– Life satisfaction +15%
– Social trust + 5%
– Civic participation + 16% (+10% FB Groups)
– Political participation + 2% (+27% FB Groups)

7. Meaning?
• FB users are more connected, happy and engaged
than what they get credited for in the MSM.
• Luddites, Putnamites, and pessimists, behold!
Positive, significant associations between FB and
social capital variables were small (10% variance at
most).
• Online networks are not a panacea for democracy
(but not their gravediggers, either).
• Causal-effect relationship? Spurious association?
Self-selection bias? Will see... Perhaps virtuous
circle?

8. Lessons for J’s
• SNS useful structures for connecting people, sharing
info. and for collective action... BUT not that much
for exchanging POVs.
• Challenges for news sites adopting SNS structure:
– Understanding who’s using SNS?
– Can own SNS emulate the benefits of global SNS?
– Developing useful applications within SNS
• As SNS and other Web 2.0 technologies diffuse, their
relationship to social capital may be different from
the picture reflected in our data.

9. Contact information
Link to project site:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~kpv/index.html
E-mail:
kpv@uts.cc.utexas.edu

10. Contact information
Link to project site:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~kpv/index.html
E-mail:
kpv@uts.cc.utexas.edu