A Review of Facebook Research in the Social Sciences

By Robert E. Wilson, Samuel D. Gosling, Lindsay T. Graham. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012

1,258 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With over 800 million active users, Facebook is changing the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another and share information. A rapidly growing body of research has accompanied the meteoric rise of Facebook as social scientists assess the impact of Facebook on social life. In addition, researchers have recognized the utility of Facebook as a novel tool to observe behavior in a naturalistic setting, test hypotheses, and recruit participants. However, research on Facebook emanates from a wide variety of disciplines, with results being published in a broad range of journals and conference proceedings, making it difficult to keep track of various findings. And because Facebook is a relatively recent phenomenon, uncertainty still exists about the most effective ways to do Facebook research. To address these issues, the authors conducted a comprehensive literature search, identifying 412 relevant articles, which were sorted into 5 categories: descriptive analysis of users, motivations for using Facebook, identity presentation, the role of Facebook in social interactions, and privacy and information disclosure. The literature review serves as the foundation from which to assess current findings and offer recommendations to the field for future research on Facebook and online social networks more broadly.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbbae0d69319c43e2cf48b0769409acd1a616d5e

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Citations in the corpus

News Sharing in Social Media: A Review of Current Research on News Sharing Users, Content, and Networks (2015, background): “Previous literature reviews focusing on social media already described the difficulties to systematically analyze research on the topic (Caers et al., 2013; Wilson et al., 2012; Zhang & Leung, 2014).”
Social Networking Sites, Depression, and Anxiety: A Systematic Review (2016, background): “SNSs in particular connect us to friends, family, colleagues, strangers, and celebrities and can help users to maintain and make new friendships, express thoughts and feelings, and express identity [1,4,19].”
Authenticity and well-being on social network sites: A two-wave longitudinal study on the effects of online authenticity and the positivity bias in SNS communication (2014, background): “In light of the truly remarkable growth of its market leader Facebook to recently more than a billion monthly active users worldwide (Facebook, 2013), the segment of social network sites has started to receive massive scholarly attention over the last fear years (Wilson, Gosling, & Graham, 2012).”
Skype as a Tool for Qualitative Research Interviews (2016, methodology): “…a topic of enquiry include: online ethnographies (Beneito-Montagut 2011; Garcia et al. 2009; Kozinets 2009); blogs analysis (Hookway 2008; Rettberg 2008); Facebook as a research tool and source of data (Baker 2013; Baltar & Brunet 2012; Brickman Bhutta 2012;Taylor et al. 2014; Wilson et al. 2012).”
Gender differences in mediated communication: Women connect more than do men (2013, background): “There has been a large body of research dedicated to determining motivations for adoption and use of social networking sites (see Wilson, Gosling, and Graham (2012) for a review).”
Internet use and well-being: A survey and a theoretical framework (2018, background): “Fourth, Internet has made it possible to create new communication tools that are now commonly used in most work places, such as email or internal communication platforms (e.g. “Facebook at Work”).”
Studying Facebook via data extraction: the Netvizz application (2013, background): “It is no wonder, then, that researchers from many areas of the human and social sciences have moved quickly to study the platform: a recent review article [19] identified 412 peer-reviewed research papers that follow empirical approaches, not counting the numerous publications employing conceptual a”
Qualitative and Mixed Methods Social Media Research (2016, methodology): “Google Scholar was included as one of the databases searched for during this literature review due to its broad reach across interdisciplinary academic scholarship indexed on the Internet and its use in prior literature review studies (see Błachnio et al., 2013; Dhir et al., 2013; Kalampokis et al.,”