If you have a Facebook account, you probably notice a few of you friends posting way more than others. Is there a reason they do this? Tara explains how people that share personal information on social media frequently might be feeling lonely or depressed!
The purpose of a study by Yeslam Al-Saggaf and Sharon Nielsen was to determine if there is a relationship between loneliness and self-disclosure in the social networking sites Facebook. Among 616 Facebook users in the study, half (308) were categorized as ‘connected’ and the remaining 308 were classified as ‘lonely’ — based on clearly stating the feeling of loneliness on their latest wall post.
• More lonely people disclosed private information such as Address than the connected (people who were connected in a relationship).
• Less lonely people did not disclose any private information compared to the connected.
• Less lonely people disclosed their Views and their Wall than those connected people.
• More lonely people did not disclose Views and their Wall compared to connected people.
• No other significant associations between loneliness and other variables were found.
SOURCE: YeslamAl-Saggaf, Sharon Nielsen. Self-disclosure on Facebook among female users and its relationship to feelings of loneliness Computers in Human Behavior
Volume 36, July 2014, Pages 460-468