Authors:
Hwai-Chung Ho | Academia Sinica | Taiwan
Yang-chih Fu | Academia Sinica | Taiwan
Ming-Yi Chang | Academia Sinica | Taiwan
Wei-chung Liu | Academia Sinica | Taiwan
Miao-Chen Chiang | Academia Sinica | Taiwan
Key words: network position, Facebook interaction, contact preference index.
Abstract
The surge of social media over the last decade has given rise to alternative and additional occasions for extensive social interactions in everyday life. On popular social networking sites, in particular, users can interact beyond the constraints of time and space, and have more chances to express their preferences about whom to contact more frequently and intensely. Most previous studies about social media have based their investigations on the number of links in the online social network of interest. Taking advantage of the rich information embedded at both link and contact levels of social interactions on social media, the present study instead examines an ego’s contact intensities and preferences associated with her alters. Our approach is facilitated by the availability of representative survey data and contact records retrieved from the Facebook accounts of 959 senior college students in 26 classes from 22 Taiwanese universities. This particular cohort of students entered college in the autumn of year 2012, and we analyze the online records from June 19, 2013 to December 22, 2015. To better capture the students’ dynamic interactions within the class, we develop a measure to quantify the extent to which students in the same class prefer to contact a particular individual over others. We analyze those classmates who had at least one exchange with the ego on Facebook during the period, through texting or tagging, with a total of 181,544 contacts. The value of the measure represents how popular an ego is among the Facebook friends in her class, thus incorporating the asymmetric nature of interactions between every pair of Facebook friends. We further standardize the measure by the number of active Facebook users in the ego’s class, so that its value ranges from zero to one, which we call a contact preference index (CPI). Such standardization allows us to aggregate the CPIs of all students from their respective class networks to address some important issues about interactions on social media. Preliminary analyses show that the distribution of the CPI value follows the power law, which indicates clear effects of preferential attachment in Facebook interactions. The CPI value also tends to associate closely with certain aspects of ego’s interaction patterns. For example, an ego tends to score a higher CPI value if she interacts with more alters who are popular themselves. We expect that the CPI may help explain network effects on substantive research issues based on survey data.