Self Esteem as it Relates to Facebook Friends: Is there a relationship between the two in adolescents?

Background 14,000,000 teenagers aged have Facebook profile’s in the United States – 10% of total US Facebook population Teenagers report cyberbullying on Facebook among other social media avenues School counselors continually work with students: – With a lower self-esteem – Needing social skills – Making and repairing friendships

Construct (Facebook Importance) We created the FIS scale to measure our construct. The FIS measures the level of importance a person has in the Facebook realm (as opposed to importance in the real world). The FIS categorizes a person as having Facebook Importance when he or she has more than 231 Friends on Facebook. The FIS scale was created by taking the average number of friends for teens between

Lit Review Two Benefits from our Lit Review: Avoiding Unintentional Replication, Placing us in a better position to better understand our own results. What we found: There are real benefits for the research community from our study! Our construct is unique among research already done, and adds to the limited research done on self-esteem as it relates to Facebook. Our research, along with the other studies using different constructs (variables), show some relationship between Facebook use and self-esteem.

Lit Review One article measured Self-Esteem and Contingencies of Self Worth. It looks at how people share information on Facebook rather than number of friends. They found links between Self-Esteem and amount of sharing, but not with statistical significance. Another measured social capital (benefits from relationships) and facebook use. For those with low self-esteem, Facebook served as a useful “bridge” to building social capital – Ellison, 2007

Lit Review Another showed similar results regarding the benefits of building social capital for those with self-esteem, but also looked at how it helps at how it helps maintain relationships while also helping build new ones. Students with low-self esteem benefit more from facebook because it provides less fear of rejection whereas those with high self-esteem would be more likely to engage in relationship in social settings. It showed that while many “friends” are loose connections, they still serve a useful purpose for building social capital –Stienfield, Ellison, Lampe, 2008 Another looked at compensatory friending and the moderating role of public self-consciousness. It showed a causal relationship between low self-esteem and friending for those who are had more public-self consciousness (socially driven). -Lee, Moore, Park, Park

Measuring Self-Esteem Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) is most widely used self-report for Global Self-Esteem (GSE) – Created from a study of 5,024 high school students (Jr. and Sr.) randomly selected in NY. – This scale has been translated into 6 languages and is used in 53 different nations. Wanted to measure student self-esteem

Hypothesis Facebook importance in teenagers will correlate with Self-Esteem.

Method Using questions from the RSES, a survey was created digitally – Comprised of: 10 questions of RSES – Adaptation to reduce negative stigmatization 2 Facebook related questions – Increased associated items 3 demographic items Students from grades involved in extracurricular activities were asked to respond to the survey – Students were briefed about – Parental consent was needed Surveys were ed to participants. Results were compiled

Survey Created this surveysurvey Distributed through

Demographics

Results

If you eliminate the outliers seen on the graph: – 1120 friends : SE score of 12 – 785 friends : SE score of 22 – (r) = -.13

Validity Threats to Internal Validity – Instrumentation Do the measures test what they should? – Selection bias Not a wide sample Threats to External Validity – Interference of prior treatment Many students in extracurricular have high self-esteem support from teammates/coaches – Interaction of selection and treatment Students involved in extracurriculars

Conclusions We can report a very slight moderate correlation (r= -.219) between FIS and SE. Findings are not enough to suggest a causational relationship.

Limitations Can’t determine Causal relationships Self-reporting Bias, knowing they’re being studied and what is being focused on Time constraints to making complete question validity No Test-retest for reliability

References Ellison, N., Steinfield, C., Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook “friends:” Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12, George, D. (2011). “Friending facebook?” A minicourse on the use of social media by health professionals. Journal of continuing education in the health professions, 31 (3), Steinfield, C., Ellison, N., Lampe, C. (2008). Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social networking sites: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 29, More