Los agrupamientos industriales (clusters) y la competitividad

Findings from the analyses detailed in Chapter 4 suggested several significant

relationships between aspects of technology use, particularly SNS use, and feelings of social support and university belonging. In this chapter, the larger context surrounding these results, implications for researchers and practitioners, and suggestions for further research are presented. There are many additional questions that the research results generate, particularly looking at how measurement instruments may be adapted to shed more light on relatively unknown phenomena, how technology use influences specific populations, and how similar research on a larger scale may provide greater insight into the topic of SNS use and social, as well as

psychological, outcomes of college.

Findings Internet and SNS Use, and the Applicability of the FIS

In terms of use of the Internet, the survey responses seem indicative of the shifts other scholars have noted. Students increasingly have access to the Internet at a younger age (Tapscott, 2009). In this study, the average age when students first had access to the Internet was

approximately 7. While students indicated their number of years using Social Networking Sites (5.81 years) and instant messaging (6.52 years) well above five years, the number of years on average that students used online forums (3.14 years) and chat rooms (2.77 years) was

significantly lower. These latter technologies are often seen as “older,” wherein perhaps only a few years ago, students may have indicated more use of those technologies over SNSs and chat rooms. In this sample, students were primarily using Facebook as a social networking tool, and to a lesser degree, using Twitter and MySpace, but no other technology listed in the survey was used by over ten percent of the sample. Evident in this survey was the prominent growth of SNS

use from the early 2000s (before Facebook was even launched) until today. The substantial growth in members of SNSs indicates this trend goes beyond college, yet from this survey and other studies, it seems that undergraduate, and particularly on-campus living provides even greater opportunity to interact online using SNSs. The observation by McMillan and Morrison (2008) that college students in particular are experiencing a greater dependence on online technologies for a number of activities was supported by this study.

In regards to the FIS and its supplemental items, responses were quite notable. For one, the mean number of Facebook Friends students had (approximately 564) is significantly more than Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) found in their study. They did not ask for the actual number but found the mean to be 4.39, where 4 indicated “151-200 [friends]” and 5 indicated “201-250 [friends].” This shift represents more than double the number of Friends on average for students responding to this survey. One potential reason for this large shift may be due to the difference between asking students to provide a categorical (range) response to the question of number of Facebook Friends rather than an actual count. What is more likely is that this may have much to do with the relative youth of Facebook when Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe’s study was conducted; regardless, it bears some indication that Facebook has become more immersive for many of today’s college students and has allowed for greater expansion of students’ interactive networks, at least in terms of number of friends.

In addition to the significant increase in the number of Facebook friends from the FIS, there were also several differences in the responses to FIS items between this study and Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe’s (2007). In particular (Table 46), three items had an increase of

Table 46

Comparison of the FIS in 2007 and 2012 Study

FIS Item E, S, & L 2007 Ruud, 2012 Change

Minutes per day on Facebook (0 – less than 10, 1 – 10 to 30, 2 – 31 to 60, 3 – 1 to 2 hours, 4 – 2 to 3 hours, 5 – more than 3 hours)

2.07 3.79 1.72

Facebook is part of my everyday activity 3.12 4.02 0.90

I am proud to tell people I'm on Facebook 3.24 3.10 -0.14

Facebook has become part of my daily routine 2.96 3.99 1.03

I feel out of touch when I haven't logged onto Facebook for a while

2.29 3.25 0.96

I feel I am part of the Facebook community 3.30 3.38 0.08

I would be sorry if Facebook shut down 3.45 3.47 0.02

everyday activity,” “Facebook has become part of my daily routine,” and “I feel out of touch when I haven’t logged onto Facebook for a while.” All of these items pertain to the necessity of using Facebook or the frequency of daily use. It appears that students are using Facebook more as part of a daily routine and depending on it to stay in touch than they have in the past. Students are also using Facebook more on a daily basis, as indicated by their responses to the question asking how many minutes per day they used Facebook. In Ellision, Steinfield, and Lampe’s study, students averaged 2.07 in their response to the question, indicating somewhere on the low end between 10 to 30 minutes and 31 to 60 minutes per day, while responses to the survey in this study averaged 3.79, indicating somewhere on the high end between 31 to 60 minutes and 1 to 2 hours per day. With little doubt, students are using Facebook more now than they have in the past, and are typically parts of larger social networks on SNSs.

In terms of the supplemental items added to the FIS, they were quite informative in providing more detail regarding students’ Facebook use. It would be difficult to draw

significant other) without knowing whether students actually use Facebook for those types of interaction. When examining the means in Table 26, it is clear there are differences between the levels at which students interact with family and friends, as well as between friends from college and friends from high school.

Relationships Between SNS Use, Social Support, and University Belonging

According to several studies, Internet use, specifically SNS use, has the potential to influence a number of outcomes among college students. This may be due to the fact that most online relationships individuals have with others are with people with whom the individuals already have established relationships. This is especially true among Facebook users, who, in this study, noted a high level of Facebook Friends were either friends from high school or peers at the same institution they were attending. This supports the notion that the Internet for the most part increases the interconnectedness students already have with others (Livingstone, 2003).

For traditional college-age students, the influences of Internet and SNS use may be more pronounced. Researchers such as Campbell, Cumming, and Hughes (2006) found no negative relationships between Internet use and negative outcomes such as depression, anxiety, or social fearfulness, and found that, for their sample, those who interacted online tended to feel less social fearfulness and greater means to honestly disclose information online. Similarly, this present study found few items with negative correlations to measured perceptions of social support and university belonging. In most cases, positive responses to FIS items were found to have positive correlations to MSPSS and PSSM outcomes. The one exception dealt with students feeling as if using Facebook had become a part of their daily “routine,” while a similar question about Facebook being a part of a student’s everyday “activity” yielded positive relationships in

the same analysis. Those negative correlations may have more to do with question phrasing than discernible measures of Facebook dependence or use.

Other findings by researchers regarding Facebook and/or other SNS use were supported by this present study. Raacke and Bonds-Raacke found that 96 percent of students they surveyed indicated using SNSs to remain connected with existing relationships. This present study

similarly found that using Facebook for such a reason, particularly to stay connected with friends from high school, was related to the greatest number of social support and university belonging outcomes, even when controlled for demographic and background characteristics. Oswald and Clark (2003), in a study conducted prior to the release of Facebook, found that geographic proximity to close friends had no bearing on the strength of these relationships; instead, it was the maintenance of frequent communication that had the strongest relationships. For those who indicated using Facebook to stay connected with friends from high school, greater levels of perceived social support from friends were found.

Social Support and Outcomes

As evidenced in the literature review in Chapter 2, there is a strong tie between the construct of “social integration” and college persistence. While this construct is not synonymous with those of social support or university belonging, there are relationships between the two (Christie & Dinham, 1991; Tinto, 1993). Students who are more involved in institutional events and interacting both in and out of the classroom with other peers tend to feel greater support and belonging, and consequently, also feel greater social integration. The strong tie social integration has to retention suggests that students who feel greater social support from multiple sources, including their friends, family, and significant others, as well as those who feel like more a part of their institution, may have a greater tendency to persist through graduation. This is especially

pertinent from year one to year two, where a significant amount of student departure takes place. Those students who can be better integrated as early as possible, both socially and academically, will have the best chance of staying and persisting in college (Woosley & Miller, 2009).

Taken further, social interaction and social support has been found to yield better

outcomes for college students, whether academically (Véronneau, Vitaro, Brendgen, Dishion, & Tremblay, 2010), psychologically (Brendgen, Lamarche, Wanner, & Vitaro, 2010), or in post- graduation experiences (Astin, 1993). The demographic analyses of Chapter 4, furthermore, suggest that male students, as well students who identified as Asian, may have lower levels of perceived social support, and therefore may not experience these benefits and gains as much as females or students of other races/ethnicities. Due to the limitations of examining students at only one institution, these differences in race/ethnicity and gender in regards to social support and university belonging may differ. A longitudinal study of the outcomes of students,

particularly a broader and more diverse sample, based on their social experiences and feelings of social support through college may better shed light on this phenomenon, and would provide valuable insight into the power of social experiences to influence college and long-term success.

One difficulty in this study stems from drawing connections between technology use and issues such as persistence and retention. In many ways, the connections are intuitively drawn, albeit from separate studies in different contexts, to suggest that technology use which can positively influence students’ feelings of belonging and social support may contribute to gains in social integration, which in turn yield better potential for students to remain at an institution through graduation. A study which would explicitly examine these connections for a single sample would be highly complex, by examining a number of questions: 1) how does technology use, specifically SNS use, influence both social and academic integration of college students? 2)

How does this influence on integrative experiences translate to outcomes variables, specifically persistence and graduation? 3) Do other mediating variables influence the strength of

relationships between technology use and integration, such as background characteristics, demographics, and institution type? Research suggests that such mediating variables are key to understanding the broader picture of integration on student success (Chapman & Pascarella, 1983). To examine these considerations within the context of technology use is indeed a

daunting task, but one that would contribute greatly to the literature on Tinto’s (1975) theory of student departure and other studies on social and academic integration.

Findings in Context

Although the study was performed on a relatively small sample, the results bring up important questions in the larger, more general context of higher education and technology. Without doubt, today’s college students are among the most technologically connected individuals in the world. Most residential institutions are expected to provide 24-hour-a-day Internet connectivity, while students who live on-campus use the Internet to do homework, interact, and entertain themselves. It is those personal interactions that students have with peers, friends, and others that seem to provide a host of both positive and negative outcomes for individuals. Many college students, particularly those that use Facebook, find themselves interacting with others at an even greater rate than before the technology was made available.

One particularly interesting aspect of the importance of interactions is those close relationships students maintain with friends from high school. Particularly for traditional-age college students, especially those in their first years in college, close ties with friends from high school tend to assuage feelings of loneliness that may appear for those who do not stay

Facebook to stay connected with friends from high school is positively related to aspects of social support. Before the Internet was the prominent form of interaction, researchers found this tie between maintaining high school connections and positive psychological outcomes (Christie & Dinham, 1991). The ease in which individuals use Facebook in order to remain connected with friends from high school appears to aid in the development of these feelings of support and likewise the psychological gains attributed to this support.

In Schultz and Saklofske’s (1983) study of loneliness and perceptions of social support, they concluded that “loneliness has been suggested as an acute problem of college students because the experience may be precipitated by a change of location to where no social support system exists” (p. 849). Technologies such as Facebook have potential to alleviate the

development of loneliness due to the existence of a perhaps “virtual” social support system that helps make students feel like they belong; indeed, the results of this present study show

correlation between Facebook use and social support. These types of online socially supportive behaviors may alleviate feelings of loneliness, hence increasing the importance and value of online interaction to college students. This is an important topic that would benefit from future in-depth studies. How do Internet technologies, specifically SNSs, affect psychological factors, such as loneliness, and how does this play into the larger concern of student success and

retention?

Further, while the FIS as a whole did not serve as a strong predictor of social support and university belonging scales and subscales, some individual items within the FIS, as well the developed supplemental items, yielded significant correlations even when controlled for by demographic and Internet use history variables. This suggests that some items of the FIS may not necessarily get at the construct of Facebook integration. For example, one item of the FIS, “I am

proud to tell people I am on Facebook,” appears to be somewhat of a dated question, as

Facebook has spread considerably since its limited introduction to students in higher education institutions. This growth may have led to the novelty of the technology wearing off. Students who indicate not being proud to tell people they are on Facebook does not necessarily indicate less dependence or investment in the technology; instead, students may simply not need to tell others or may find neither pride nor shame in using the SNS. Similarly, the question regarding whether students would be sorry if Facebook were shut down, may not be a strong indicator of Facebook usage or dependence. With Facebook’s growth and continual development, students may find themselves “worn out” using it so heavily and not necessarily sorry to find it shutting down, but are still dependent upon it for interaction and investing heavily in using it.

Implications for Research

Social Support and University Belonging. This particular study would provide benefit to understandings of the relationships between SNS use and social support as well as university belonging through repetition on a larger scale or different sample. What differences might this study find if the study were repeated for different students, such as those who exclusively attend college online, adult students, as well as those at private, for-profit and not-for-profit

institutions? Do the findings from this study adequately reflect the larger universe of college-age students in the US? A larger sample involving many more students could provide additional insight into the phenomenon of Facebook use and it influence on social support and belonging.

One of the most influential variables that persisted even when controlled for by Internet use history and demographic variables pertained to the use of Facebook to stay connected with friends from high school. This variable in particular needs to be examined in more depth. For example, does the use of Facebook to connect with high school friends yield greater influence for

freshman students than, say, for seniors? How does geographic distance between the high school and the college attended influence the necessity for high school connections? Qualitative studies may also provide greater detail on this phenomenon. Students may be able to explain the

influence of high school friends on their academic and social lives at their institution, and provide greater explanation into the phenomenon. Further, there was some indication that there was a connection between using Facebook to connect with high school friends and social support from significant others. How do close and/or romantic relationships with friends from high school relate to Facebook use and the influence of this use on other variables?

Other questions that emerged from the study would benefit from additional examination. For example, the relationship between parents’ highest level of education and social support was found to be significant for this sample. Is the variable of highest parental level of education a proxy of other characteristics, such as socioeconomic status or social/cultural capital (see publications such as Choy, 2001 and Hahs-Vaughn, 2004 for examples of studies involving parents’ highest level of education and college outcomes)? Similarly, what may be causing the differences between demographic groups in regards to social support and university belonging? Why did females indicate, on average, higher levels of social support than males in this sample? Why were Asian students indicating lower levels of belonging and social support than White students? Do other variables such as international student status, distance from parents and high school, and educational variables (GPA, major, preparation, etc.) influence these relationships?

It is still unknown how the influences that SNSs may have on social support and university belonging in turn affect the outcomes in which many researchers, practitioners, and