• A
  • A
  • A
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
Regular version of the site

Social capital and privacy online: an urban community on a social networking site

Project leader: Olessia Koltsova

Project participants: Yury Rykov, Yadviga Sinyawskaia, Maxim Koltsov

 

Social networking sites (SNS) provide their users with a diverse functionality for communication which s enables them to grow their social capital, but simultaneously  poses risks to user privacy. This is  especially true given that communication networks, as a rule, develop within the same city or the closest rural area where anonymity is not always possible.

This project investigates how different styles of SNS use and individuals’ activity affect their social capital in an urban online community. Privacy-related behavior is regarded an important factor that can both stimulate and restrict development of user’s social capital.  Therefore, a city’s online social network is studied as a space where users have to find balance between a desired level of embeddedness in communication and an acceptable level of privacy.

The project collects data from all users of VKontakte social networking site from a typical middle-sized Russian city, including users’ friendship networks, their open personal information and the data about their activity and feedback. A fraction of these users are also subject to an online survey. It asks them about their goals of and benefits from SNS usage and reveals their personality traits. Ultimately, the research team intends to obtain conclusions about association between those traits, socio-demographic features and behavior patterns with users’ privacy attitudes and the level of their social capital, as well as about the structure of an urban social network.

 

Data collection and analysis is performed with VKMiner, Pajek, SPSS и R.


 

Have you spotted a typo?
Highlight it, click Ctrl+Enter and send us a message. Thank you for your help!
To be used only for spelling or punctuation mistakes.