Families on Facebook

By Moira Burke, Lada A. Adamic, Karyn Marciniak. 2013

47 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This descriptive study of millions of US Facebook users documents "friending" and communication patterns, exploring parent-child relationships across a variety of life stages and gender combinations. Using statistical techniques on 400,000 posts and comments, we identify differences in how parents talk to their children (giving advice, affection, and reminders to call) compared to their other friends, and how they address their adult sons and daughters (talking about grandchildren and health concerns, and linguistically treating them like peers) compared to their teenage children. Parents and children have 20-30 mutual friends on the site, 19% of whom are relatives. Unlike previous findings on family communication, interaction frequency on Facebook does not decrease with geographic distance.

Subfields: Communication, Education, Sociology and Political Science

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Alexandra Olteanu
2. Fernando Diaz
3. Carlos Castillo
4. Emre Kıcıman
5. Noah A. Smith
6. Yejin Choi
7. Maarten Sap
8. Muhammad Imran

In Education

1. Noah A. Smith
2. Emre Kıcıman
3. Alexandra Olteanu
4. Jun Pang
5. Yang Zhang

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Alexandra Olteanu
2. Fernando Diaz
3. Maarten Sap
4. Carlos Castillo
5. Yejin Choi
6. Noah A. Smith
7. Emre Kıcıman
8. Yulia Tsvetkov

Citations in the corpus

• Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “…focused than others depending on their demographics (e.g., women tend to be more focused toward their top friends); while others indicate that how users interact depends on the type of relation they share (Burke et al., 2013) and on shared characteristics (i.e., homophily) (McPherson et al., 2001).”
• The Effect of Different Writing Tasks on Linguistic Style: A Case Study of the ROC Story Cloze Task (2017, methodology): “…to answer this question, we consider the highest absolute positive and negative coefficients in the logistic regression classifier in Experiments 1 and 2, an approach widely used as a method of extracting the most salient features (Nguyen et al., 2013; Burke et al., 2013; Brooks et al., 2013).”
• Children Seen But Not Heard: When Parents Compromise Children's Online Privacy (2015, background): “When parents post photos of children to Facebook or In-stagram, they likely have only positive intentions: for example, to share updates about their family and life with grandparents, or to chronicle their lives’ events [6].”