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Category: Project

Description: Social relationships are important for psychological well-being and as Facebook is an inherently social platform, research has focused on how Facebook use is associated with indicators of psychological well-being such as loneliness. Time spent on Facebook tends to be associated with higher levels of loneliness, whereas a larger number of Facebook Friends and more active use of Facebook tends to be associated with lower levels of loneliness. However, whilst the network size and structure of ‘offline’ networks have been associated with loneliness, how the network structure on Facebook is associated with loneliness is still unclear. In this study, participants used the Getnet app to directly extract information on network size (number of Facebook Friends), density, number of sub-groups and average path length from their Facebook networks, and completed the UCLA Loneliness questionnaire. In total, 107 participants (36 men, 71 women, mean age = 20.6, SD = 2.7) took part in the study. Participants with a larger network size reported significantly lower feelings of loneliness. In contrast, network density, number of sub-groups and average path length were not significantly related to loneliness. These results suggest that whilst having a larger Facebook network is related to feelings of social connection to others, the structure of the Facebook network may be a less important determinant of loneliness than other factors such as active or passive use of Facebook and individual characteristics of Facebook users.