Social Networking Service Users Research Articles

The usage of social network services in school management and their effects

This study, which aims to find out the positive and negative aspects of the usage of social networking services in the management of schools, was designed as a qualitative research. Open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interview forms were used together with multiple data collection techniques in this study. It was found that some of the schools used the Facebook account as social network service in the past, and then they deactivated their accounts. On the other hand, it was noted that all school principals used WhatsApp application for communication with other administrators and teachers of their schools. The findings of this study revealed that the school principals’ following positive views such as eliminating the time and space constraints in communication, being fast and safe, being useful in sharing school resources and materials, being easy to manage and being effective in moving the school culture out of the school.Keywords: School management, school culture, technology aided communication, social network services, interaction

Investigating the Mediating Role of Social Networking Service Usage on the Big Five Personality Traits and on the Job Satisfaction of Korean Workers

This study examines how the Big Five personality traits and the use of social networking services (SNSs) promote job satisfaction among Korean workers. The study sample is drawn from the Korean Education & Employment Panel (KEEP) for 2011, which gathers comprehensive data on Koreans' individual demographics, including information regarding their education, families, and work and personal lives. Structural equation modeling is employed to examine the mediation model between Big-Five personality and job satisfaction of workers. From a sample of 1,646 workers employed in Korean workplaces, the authors found that the Big Five personality traits were significantly related to SNS usage and job satisfaction. SNS usage was found to be a factor in determining job satisfaction, and SNS usage partially mediated the relationship between personality (extroversion and neuroticism) and job satisfaction. To improve employees' work-related attitudes, organizations must recognize the growing influence of SNS usage on those workplace attitudes.

Research on collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm based on social network

For users of social-based social networking services, we propose a local random walk-based friend recommendation approach by bringing together social network and tie strength. We firstly construct a weighted friend network as the basis for friend recommendation. Then, users' similarity is determined by a local random walk-based similarity measure on a weighted friend network. Experiments show that we use real social network data to evaluate the new method. The validity of the method is illustrated.

Research on collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm based on social network

For users of social-based social networking services, we propose a local random walk-based friend recommendation approach by bringing together social network and tie strength. We firstly construct a weighted friend network as the basis for friend recommendation. Then, users' similarity is determined by a local random walk-based similarity measure on a weighted friend network. Experiments show that we use real social network data to evaluate the new method. The validity of the method is illustrated.

Examining the Effects of Passive WeChat Use in China

ABSTRACT Passive usage of social network services (SNSs) refers to individuals’ browsing behavior and information consumption without active interaction with other SNS users. Using the data collected from 295 users of WeChat, the most popular SNS in China, the authors identify two types of passive use and test their different consequences. Confirmatory factor analysis in Study 1 shows passive WeChat use includes two subdimensions, namely, passive social and nonsocial use. Passive social use means browsing friends’ posts, whereas passive nonsocial use refers to browsing information on WeChat official accounts. The partial least squares structural equation modeling results in Study 2 suggest that both social and nonsocial use have positive effects on users’ social capital and online well-being, and further increase their continuance usage of SNSs. However, passive social use is also associated with users’ depressed mood, which in turn decreases their continuous usage intention. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Just being there matters

PurposeAlthough user behaviors in social network service (SNS) have been well studied in prior literature, most of these studies focus on those behaviors with relatively deep user engagement such as information disclosure, while the underlying mechanisms that explain users’ shallow engagement behaviors (e.g. Like behavior) have been rarely discussed. To fill this research gap, the purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically test a research model to identify the antecedents of Like behavior.Design/methodology/approachThis study identifies the distinctions between post behavior and Like behavior and develops a research model of Like behavior by emphasizing the role of sense of presence from the perspective of symbolic interactionism. The model is tested through a survey with 479 users of WeChat (a popular SNS tool in China). Structural equation modeling, SmartPLS in particular, is used for data analysis.FindingsThree value perceptions, namely cognitive value, hedonic value and social value, are found to be positively associated with Like intention, and sense of presence is found to affect Like intention both directly and indirectly via the three value perceptions.Research limitations/implicationsThe research model is tested based on a specific SNS in China, so whether the conclusions can be applied to other research contexts should be further examined in future research. This study identifies the distinctions between post behavior and Like behavior and suggests to view the Like behavior from the perspective of symbolic interactionism.Practical implicationsThe paper outlines ways to effectively promote SNS users’ Like behaviors by enhancing the functions related to three value perceptions, especially by enriching the ways that facilitate interpersonal interactions.Originality/valueThis paper is one of the first to distinguish Like behavior from post behavior in SNS, propose and empirically test a research model of Like behavior. In particular, this paper strengthens the important role of sense of presence from the perspective of symbolic interactionism which has rarely been investigated in prior studies.

Twitter-Based Influenza Detection After Flu Peak via Tweets With Indirect Information: Text Mining Study.

BackgroundThe recent rise in popularity and scale of social networking services (SNSs) has resulted in an increasing need for SNS-based information extraction systems. A popular application of SNS data is health surveillance for predicting an outbreak of epidemics by detecting diseases from text messages posted on SNS platforms. Such applications share the following logic: they incorporate SNS users as social sensors. These social sensor–based approaches also share a common problem: SNS-based surveillance are much more reliable if sufficient numbers of users are active, and small or inactive populations produce inconsistent results.ObjectiveThis study proposes a novel approach to estimate the trend of patient numbers using indirect information covering both urban areas and rural areas within the posts.MethodsWe presented a TRAP model by embedding both direct information and indirect information. A collection of tweets spanning 3 years (7 million influenza-related tweets in Japanese) was used to evaluate the model. Both direct information and indirect information that mention other places were used. As indirect information is less reliable (too noisy or too old) than direct information, the indirect information data were not used directly and were considered as inhibiting direct information. For example, when indirect information appeared often, it was considered as signifying that everyone already had a known disease, leading to a small amount of direct information.ResultsThe estimation performance of our approach was evaluated using the correlation coefficient between the number of influenza cases as the gold standard values and the estimated values by the proposed models. The results revealed that the baseline model (BASELINE+NLP) shows .36 and that the proposed model (TRAP+NLP) improved the accuracy (.70, +.34 points).ConclusionsThe proposed approach by which the indirect information inhibits direct information exhibited improved estimation performance not only in rural cities but also in urban cities, which demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method consisting of a TRAP model and natural language processing (NLP) classification.

Is the popularity of social networking services beneficial for public health? Focusing on active travel and BMI

Social networking services (SNSs) can affect people's behaviour in a variety of ways; and through this their health outcomes. People generate and are exposed to content which circulates easily among a large, geographically dispersed population. They can also engage in supportive or competitive activities with their connections and the wider community. This online activity may lead to changes in behaviour and positive health outcomes e.g., exercising more or eating more healthily. Engaging with a SNS may also lead to negative outcomes such as depression, addiction, and less participation in offline social communities. As the number of SNS users has been increasing dramatically, it is important to understand if this will be beneficial or detrimental for public health. In this study, we examine how the frequency of SNS use is associated with active travel (i.e., walking and cycling) and body mass index (BMI) in the Glasgow and Clyde Valley Planning area, Scotland. We employ both a self-reported measure of active travel from a travel diary (N = 1684) and an objective measure of average walking hours from Global Positioning System (GPS) data (N = 282) collected in 2015. These are analysed with statistical models (i.e., binomial logistic regression, multinomial logistic regression and linear regression models). We find that there is no significant association between the frequency of SNS use and our subjective measure of active travel, while people who intensively use SNS are more likely to be obese than non-users. However, analyses with an objective measure of average walking hours (GPS) show that people who intensively use SNS spend less time walking and tend to be obese, calling for further analyses.

Mobile ubiquity: Understanding the relationship between cognitive absorption, smartphone addiction and social network services

The purpose of the present study is to examine the differences between user addiction to smartphone devices versus addiction to social network services (SNS), and the role of user perceptions. While a growing corpus of work has demonstrated the potentially deleterious effects of smartphone usage, relatively few studies have differentiated between addiction to the device versus addiction to social network services or measured the influence of user perceptions on smartphone addiction. To contribute to knowledge on this subject, the present study had three key aims. The first was to examine the differences between smartphone addiction and social network services addiction. The second aim was to understand the influence of user perceptions on addiction (measured through cognitive absorption to examine users' state of involvement and engagement with software and technology). Our final aim was to examine differences for demographic factors for smartphone and social networking services addiction and user perceptions. Based on a survey of business students at a university in the Mid-Atlantic region of United States, the results showed that addiction to smartphone devices is greater than addiction to social networking services and varies by educational attainment, while social networking services usage does not vary by gender, age or education. Further, users addicted to smartphones and social networking services experience higher levels of cognitive absorption, particularly by females when using social networking services and greater for social networking services than smartphones. Finally, we find that the impact of cognitive absorption on smartphone addiction is mediated by addiction to SNS services.

Interactive Behavior of an Immigrant Group on Mobile Instant Messenger-Based SNS: Textual Research on Topic-Centered Interactivity

ABSTRACTThis article outlines a study on user interaction behavior in a KakaoTalk chat room group that was formed by Chinese immigrant women in South Korea. To study the interaction of mobile instant messenger-based social network services (MIM SNS) users, this study adopted a textual research method based on the perspective of topic-centered interactivity. The study analyzed the correlativity between SNS users’ online frequency triggered by demand-induced motivation and content-induced motivation and characterized the topics of users with different activeness in the behaviors of proposing and responding to topics. The results of this study not only provide constructive references for practitioners on the issue of how to use the SNS of immigrants to exert their sociality and usability in the dissemination of immigration policies and the social management of immigrants, but also confirm the operability and value of the methods used in this study.

Technostress and social networking services: Explaining users' concentration, sleep, identity, and social relation problems

AbstractIt is common for users of social networking sites and services (SNS) to suffer from technostress and the various associated strains that hinder their well‐being. Despite prior SNS stress studies having provided valuable knowledge regarding SNS stressors and their use consequences, they have not examined the various strains related to well‐being that those stressors can create nor the underlying SNS characteristics. To address this gap in the research, we used a qualitative approach involving narrative interviews. As a contribution, our findings reveal four types of strains related to well‐being (concentration problems, sleep problems, identity problems, and social relation problems) as well as two different patterns with distinct sets of SNS stressors and SNS characteristics that generate those strains. As practical implications, the findings of this study can help technostressed users to identify their strains, understand their underlying SNS characteristics and SNS stressors, and increase the possibility that they will be able to avoid the strains in the future.

SentiFlow: An Information Diffusion Process Discovery Based on Topic and Sentiment from Online Social Networks

In this digital era, people can become more interconnected as information spreads easily and quickly through online social media. The rapid growth of the social network services (SNS) increases the need for better methodologies for comprehending the semantics among the SNS users. This need motivated the proposal of a novel framework for understanding information diffusion process and the semantics of user comments, called SentiFlow. In this paper, we present a probabilistic approach to discover an information diffusion process based on an extended hidden Markov model (HMM) by analyzing the users and comments from posts on social media. A probabilistic dissemination of information among user communities is reflected after discovering topics and sentiments from the user comments. Specifically, the proposed method makes the groups of users based on their interaction on social networks using Louvain modularity from SNS logs. User comments are then analyzed to find different sentiments toward a subject such as news in social networks. Moreover, the proposed method is based on the latent Dirichlet allocation for topic discovery and the naïve Bayes classifier for sentiment analysis. Finally, an example using Facebook data demonstrates the practical value of SentiFlow in real world applications.

Weakly Supervised Collective Feature Learning From Curated Media

The current state-of-the-art in feature learning relies on the supervised learning of large-scale datasets consisting of target content items and their respective category labels. However, constructing such large-scale fully-labeled datasets generally requires painstaking manual effort. One possible solution to this problem is to employ community contributed text tags as weak labels, however, the concepts underlying a single text tag strongly depends on the users. We instead present a new paradigm for learning discriminative features by making full use of the human curation process on social networking services (SNSs). During the process of content curation, SNS users collect content items manually from various sources and group them by context, all for their own benefit. Due to the nature of this process, we can assume that (1) content items in the same group share the same semantic concept and (2) groups sharing the same images might have related semantic concepts. Through these insights, we can define human curated groups as weak labels from which our proposed framework can learn discriminative features as a representation in the space of semantic concepts the users intended when creating the groups. We show that this feature learning can be formulated as a problem of link prediction for a bipartite graph whose nodes corresponds to content items and human curated groups, and propose a novel method for feature learning based on sparse coding or network fine-tuning.

Challenges of Vaccinations in the Era of New Media Communication.

Active discussions are underway on whether or not the absence or insufficiency of communication is a decisive factor affecting hesitancy with regard to vaccines. Low-quality services such as insufficient communication can lead to an increase in the population postponing vaccinations in countries without deficiencies in vaccine procurement. This study examines the strategies and tasks of health communication in relation to vaccinations. Social networking services (SNSs) are major channels of health communication in responding to infectious diseases. New videos posted on the Internet attract considerable amounts of attention from SNS users and increase traffic to certain Web sites. However, most of these videos are produced and uploaded by nonexperts. Although medical institutions have striven to convey key messages concerning infectious diseases to the public, in the SNS space, contents differing from scientific evidence acknowledged as the established theory have been disseminated as well. Social networking services can also amplify any unnecessary anxiety about infectious diseases. In addition, as false information about vaccines is circulated or conflicting information surfaces, the confusion of the general public is aggravated and the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy can be intensified. Therefore, it is necessary to improve vaccination acceptance through strategies that integrate new and old media. At the same time, we need to establish customized public health education for the public, vulnerable groups, and experts.

Examining Mobile SNS Continuance from a Dual Perspective of Social Capital and Privacy Concern

This article contends that due to the intense competition, it is crucial for mobile social networking services (SNS) providers to retain users and facilitate their continuance. Integrating both perspectives of social capital and privacy concern, this research examined mobile SNS continuance. Social capital includes three dimensions: structural capital, relational capital and cognitive capital. The results indicated that both social capital and privacy concerns have significant effects on continuing usage. The results imply that service providers need to develop social capital and curb privacy concerns in order to facilitate users' continuance usage of mobile SNS.

사회관계망(SNS)을 통한 과시적 여가 활동의 현상학적 연구

The purpose of this study is to analyze the ways of using the conspicuous expression of women in their twenties through social network services (SNS). In-depth interviews were conducted with female students in their twenties as research participants. The results of the study are as follows. First, this study revealed the SNS usage patterns of female students in their twenties as a leisure activity. Second, it examined how SNS was utilized as a way of self-expression. Third, this study also found out how conspicuous self-expression occurs in SNS beyond regular types of self-expression as categorizing these two distinct consumption types and revealed the reinforcement process between them. Finally, the psychology after conspicuous self-expressions was analyzed. This study has theoretical implications in the fact that it analyzed and categorized the inner aspect of SNS users applying conspicuous leisure and self-expression theories. It is also meaningful that Veblen's conspicuous leisure is expanded. Therefore, this study is expected to serve as basic data for future research investigating the psychological leisure function of women in their twenties.

A Customer Value Theory Approach to the Engagement with a Brand : The Case of KakaoTalk Plus in Korea

As an increasing number of people gained access to social network services (SNS), organizations started to use SNS as a channel for marketing and promotional purposes. The online advertising market has significant growth potential. Brand engagement is a key motive for online advertising, but how SNS users engage with brands, particularly in terms of the promotion of organizations, is poorly understood. This study uses customer value theory to examine brand engagement of users in terms of promoting companies in the context of Korean SNS marketing. This study identifies the antecedents of brand engagement based on customer value theory. Our findings show the significance of three factors of SNS marketing, namely, price discount, relationship support, and convenience, on brand engagement. We further show the consequences of brand engagement, namely, purchase decisions and word-of-mouth activities. These findings help advance customer value theory and offer practical insights into the use of information systems and marketing in the context of SNS.

Influence of Envy Types, Brand Awareness, and Regulatory Focus Chronic on Favorability of Luxury Fashion Brand -Focused on Social Network Service Users-

Influence of Envy Types, Brand Awareness, and Regulatory Focus Chronic on Favorability of Luxury Fashion Brand -Focused on Social Network Service Users-

Hiding information against structural re-identification

Connections between users of social networking services pose a significant privacy threat. Recently, several social network de-anonymization attacks have been proposed that can efficiently re-identify users at large scale, solely considering the graph structure. In this paper, we consider these privacy threats and analyze de-anonymization attacks at the model level against a user-controlled privacy-enhancing technique called identity separation. The latter allows creating seemingly unrelated identities in parallel, even without the consent of the service provider or other users. It has been shown that identity separation can be used efficiently against re-identification attacks if user cooperate with each other. However, while participation would be crucial, this cannot be granted in a real-life scenario. Therefore, we introduce the y-identity model, in which the user creates multiple separated identities and assigns the sensitive attribute to one of them according to a given strategy. For this, we propose a strategy to be used in real-life situations and formally prove that there is a higher bound for the expected privacy loss which is sufficiently low.

Selling trust in cyber space: social networking service (SNS) providers and social capital amongst netizens in South Korea

Apart from excessive bonding amongst co-ethnics, social capital studies have sparsely discussed the negative effects of social capital, including excessive collective actions towards downward social mobility (e.g. imprisonment of social and political elites). As Bourdieu has noted, social capital can conflate problems of upward social mobility through various glass ceilings in the reproduction of elite power groups. However, it is also important to notice that less fortunate groups can debunk the dominant elite social network by participating excessively in social networking service (SNS) platforms, where they exchange distorted information about the elites to organize collective actions towards their downward social mobility. Gleaned from the recent cases of ferry sinking and candlelight vigilance in South Korea, SNS providers can sell trust in cyber space that can be easily transformed into social capital for collective character assassinations, political demonstrations, and economic sabotages at workplace. Based on the big data gathered from Naver, one of the leading SNS providers in South Korea, we find that Naver provides SNS users with a rare opportunity to encounter myriad opinion groups who will over time converge into one or two similar opinion groups that can be easily mobilized towards collective actions. Selling trust in cyber space on the internet and mobile devices is a unique commercial development in South Korea and its neighbouring countries, including Japan and Taiwan.