Social Networks and Young People. Comparative Study of Facebook between Colombia and Spain
Abstract
Social networks have become areas of social interaction among young people where they create a profile to relate with others. The way this population uses social networks has an impact on their socialization as well as the emotional and affective aspects of their development. The purpose of this investigation was to analyze how Facebook is used by young people to communicate among themselves and the experiences they gain from it. On the one hand, while teenagers claim to know the risks, they admit to accepting strangers as friends and to sharing large amounts of true data about their private lives. For this reason, it is necessary to understand the media and digital phenomenon that the youth are living through. Although they are legally prohibited from using Facebook until they are 13, the number of underage users of this social network is growing, without any restraint from parents or schools. This investigation compares the use of Facebook by youth in Colombia and Spain by using the content analysis and interview techniques. In Colombia 100 Facebook profiles were analyzed and 20 interviews carried out with students between 12- and 15-years-old attending the Institución Educativa Distrital Técnico Internacional school in Bogotá. In Spain, 100 Facebook profiles were analyzed and 20 interviews held with students of the same age group attending various secondary schools in Andalusia.
Las redes sociales se han convertido en ámbitos de interacción social entre los jóvenes, que crean un perfil para relacionarse con los demás. La exposición pública en el caso de los adolescentes puede generar problemas sobre aspectos sociales, emotivos y afectivos. Esta investigación analiza cómo se usa Facebook por parte de los jóvenes y qué experiencia obtienen de ello. Aunque dicen conocer los riesgos, admiten que aceptan a desconocidos como amigos y ofrecen datos reales sobre su vida. Ante esta situación, se hace más evidente la necesidad de la alfabetización mediática y digital de estos jóvenes que, aunque no deberían estar en Facebook hasta los 13 años, cuentan con un perfil de manera mayoritaria. Para ello se ha utilizado una metodología basada en el análisis de contenido y las entrevistas en profundidad. Se trata de un estudio comparativo entre Colombia y España. En Colombia se han realizado 100 análisis de perfiles y 20 entrevistas en profundidad. La muestra ha sido de adolescentes de 12 a 15 años, de la Institución Educativa Distrital Técnico Internacional de Bogotá. En España se han analizado 100 perfiles y se han realizado 20 entrevistas a chicos de 12 a 15 años, de Institutos (IES) de Andalucía.
Supplementary resource (1)
... Esta diversidad se debe a la facilidad y versatilidad con la que los usuarios pueden compartir una variedad de contenido en cualquier lugar y momento, incluyendo fotos, videos, textos y otros tipos de medios. Además, la posibilidad de establecer conexiones con otros basadas en intereses, opiniones, preferencias y actividades compartidas ha afianzado la integración de las redes sociales en la vida diaria de numerosas personas (Almansa et al., 2013). ...
Introducción: las redes sociales modernas han revolucionado la forma en que las personas se conectan, superando las barreras geográficas y lingüísticas. A través de dispositivos móviles, la comunicación instantánea se ha convertido en la norma, con la simple creación de un perfil que permite conectar con amigos y familiares, promocionar productos y servicios, y descubrir nuevos contactos afines, independientemente de la ubicación o el idioma. Metodología: la investigación se llevó a cabo entre estudiantes mayores de edad de una institución de educación superior en Ambato, Tungurahua. Esto subraya la importancia de entender cómo estas plataformas y servicios afectan nuestras interacciones en un mundo cada vez más interconectado. Objetivos: el presente estudio tiene como finalidad analizar el nivel de adopción y participación de los usuarios en las plataformas de redes sociales proporcionadas por las empresas de telecomunicaciones, de la misma manera evaluar la calidad de los servicios y la experiencia del usuario que utilizan las plataformas de redes sociales ofrecidas por las mismas. Resultados: es relevante destacar que, tras encuestar a la población de 134 estudiantes, se ha corroborado que, a pesar de los costos elevados asociados con el uso de los servicios, la preferencia de estos estudiantes recae en los dispositivos móviles de Claro. Conclusiones: Las empresas de telecomunicaciones móviles necesitan priorizar la mejora de su cobertura de red y la expansión de sus ofertas de servicios. Área de estudio general: Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación (Tic). Área de estudio específica: Tecnologías de Comunicación Digital.
... The sample for this study consisted of posts collected from the Great Hall beginning in May 2018 and concluding October 2018. Collecting and analyzing posts and information from Facebook groups, pages, and profiles has been utilized by researchers as an established data source (Almansa et al., 2013;Harlow, 2013;Lee, 2015). The sampling strategy used in this study entailed collecting all posts within the Great Hall during a set timeframe (Wu & Pearce, 2014). ...
The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of participation and engagement among participants of a fandom-based virtual community. Netnography, a specialized from of ethnography adapted to the unique computer-mediated environment, was utilized to analyze posts collected from the Hogwarts Running Club (HRC), a closed Facebook group. The HRC was a virtual community with over 16,000 members that was founded in 2014 to provide a space for members to share stories, experiences, and passion for running and Harry Potter. The text of the collected posts was coded thematically. Four themes emerged: You’re a Wizard Harry: Shared Passion for Harry Potter, Running in the Rain: Engagement Despite Challenges, Hogwarts is Home: Identity, and Pepper-up Potion: Improvements in Mental and Physical Health and Well-being. As a conceptual framework, the themes aligned with the Serious Leisure Perspective. HRC members whose posts were analyzed exhibited one or more of the six characteristics of Serious Leisure with all six characteristics being represented within the dataset. Findings suggested that virtual communities, as a leisure setting, can facilitate Serious Leisure engagement and should be considered a viable setting for Serious Leisure participation.
Social media has become an important tool for universities to implement strategies to promote, position and differentiate their brand identity, to establish and foster the communicative relationship with their stakeholders. This study explores the interactivity strategy developed in digital communication by 70 leading universities from Europe, the United States and Latin America. A specific quantitative methodology was designed to analyze the universities’ social media publications (90,241). The general communicative approach and the communication resources applied were studied through quantitative content analysis. Results show that the universities have an informational approach in their publications on social networks, with little differences among regions and platforms. Expositive and interactive resources are being used in a broad, integrated manner although there are some differences in each region and social network. Thus, the universities opt for a monological interactivity strategy in their digital institutional communication, with little differences between social networks. They are changing toward a model that continues to prioritize dissemination of information, but it is evolving toward more combination of various communication resources that make content more attractive to their publics. This research provides insights into interactivity strategies used by universities on social networks to develop effective digital communication strategies for enhancing engagement with publics.
En un mundo donde la progresión profesional va acompañada por la escasez y la creciente exigencia de empleos, junto con la presencia de profesionales sobrecualificados para determinadas posiciones laborales, este estudio se propone analizar los factores asociados en la inserción laboral de los graduados en las últimas tres promociones de la Carrera de Psicología Educativa y Orientación (PEO) de la Universidad Nacional de Loja. La metodología empleada consiste en una encuesta digital preelaborada con el propósito de identificar los factores que influyen al momento de insertarse a la vida laboral, buscando así asegurar que los profesionales estén debidamente preparados y competentes. Entre los resultados destacan dos factores con mayor influencia: competencias personales y brecha de género. Se concluye que las competencias personales se deben formar a mayor profundidad dentro del salón de clases y se subraya la necesidad de abordar la discriminación de género como parte integral de la estrategia para reducir la brecha de género. Se resalta, la importancia de fortalecer las habilidades personales y abordar las disparidades de género para mejorar la inserción laboral de los graduados. Nota: La información de este artículo es extraída de la tesis de posgrado Titulada: Factores Asociados a la Inserción Laboral de los profesionales en la Carrera de Psicología Educativa y Orientación
Over recent years, the sharing of personal data among students is uncontrolled, especially on the social media networks, resulting in widespread data intrusions that compromise their privacy and confidentiality. Against this backdrop, this study was conducted to identify the level of knowledge of personal data protection among students. This research design of this study was based on a quantitative approach using a survey. The sample study was made up of 133 students at a public university in the state of Perak, consisting of 62 males and 71 females, aged between 17 and 24 years. The research instruments used were based on a set of multiple choice questions to gather information relating to their demographic and their levels of knowledge of personal data protection. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and an independent samples t-test. The former showed that the respondents’ levels of knowledge of personal data protection were moderate, while the latter showed there was no significant difference in the levels of such knowledge between male and female respondents. Given this revelation, it is imperative for all stakeholders to increase the efforts to improve users’ knowledge of personal data protection through either the formal education or informal education.
Las funcionalidades de las diferentes redes sociales permiten en tiempo real y diferido, la colaboración y divulgación de información académica y científica. El objetivo del estudio fue conocer la tendencia en el uso de redes sociales en relación al ámbito académico, y evaluar la influencia de un programa específico de enseñanza-aprendizaje aplicado a través de la red social Instagram en alumnos universitarios. Este estudio sigue un diseño transversal descriptivo y posteriormente un diseño cuasiexperimental de medidas pre post test en el que los docentes postearon infografías durante 8 semanas. Un total de 120 estudiantes (22,13 ± 2,83 años) participaron en el estudio. Entre los resultados encontramos que los perfiles creados mejoraron el contacto con expertos, ayudan a mejorar aspectos académicos relacionados con la carrera profesional y facilitan intercambio de apuntes. Se concluye que el uso de Instagram es adecuado y mejora aspectos relacionados con el grado que estudian.
In a reality that combines the virtual with the physical and in a context of information saturation, there are consumers who are more critical, demanding, and less loyal. In this context, it is timely to know the new habits of the Centennials, so as to understand their behaviors and consumption trends, aligning future communication strategies to their personality and interests. The Centennials or Generation Z are digital natives, concerned with technology, and complex to understand (Alonso-López; Terol-Bolinches, 2020). Generation Z-analyzed in this study-is composed of those born between 2000 and 2008, which corresponds to the youth currently between 14 and 22 years old (Vilanova; Ortega, 2017; Hernández; Andrade-del-Cid, 2020). The main objective of this research is to determine the patterns of consumption and online behavior exhibited by this generation in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Panama, with a focus on the characteristics of communication processes, online consumption patterns, and the cultural traits they possess. To achieve this, a mixed method is proposed consisting of a Twitter conversation analysis, survey application (n=550), in-depth interviews (n=36), and focus groups (n=2); all of which have been applied in the four selected countries. The main conclusions are that the preferred content of Centennials is humor (75%), with Instagram and TikTok being the most used networks. For they, the most important thing is to take care of their image and 40% are not interested in technological topics. Furthermore , cultural characteristics are shared among countries; however, language is the main difference between countries.
This study aims to determine whether or not there is an association between creating fake user accounts and engaging in behaviors deemed to constitute cyberbullying. A quantitative research methodology was used with a clear descriptive and interpretative intent. The sample comprised 1989 adolescents aged between 10 and 17 years from five regions in Southern Europe, who completed an online questionnaire. The results reveal that adolescents aged 16 years were the ones who engaged most in cyberbullying actions. Those who created false profiles tended to engage in more behaviors linked to cyberbullying. Adolescent social media users were mainly older boys who engaged more in cyberbullying behaviors. Relatively few adolescents claim to engage regularly in behaviors linked to cyberbullying. The study concludes that there is an urgent need to provide adolescents with training in the responsible use of digital technologies at an earlier age, before they begin using them assiduously.
El potencial de transformación comunitaria que tiene la participación juvenil se reconoce cada vez más en el ámbito político-práctico-académico. El artículo analiza el aprendizaje metodológico de nuestro proyecto digital participativo basado en la música y las artes con jóvenes afrocolombianos e indígenas en Quibdó-Colombia, una zona afectada por el conflicto, la violencia y la marginación sistémica. Presentando la metodología digital coproducida, reflexionamos sobre los desafíos y oportunidades que surgen al involucrar jóvenes en geografías marginadas a través de formas creativas y digitales de participación. Cuando el COVID-19 ha destacado los desafíos de la exclusión digital a nivel mundial, nuestros hallazgos aportan consideraciones prácticas para planificar proyectos digitales inclusivos con jóvenes en marginalidad, resaltando la necesidad de la contextualización relevante en los enfoques metodológicos y pedagógicos, y la aproximación transdisciplinar de los equipos pedagógicos para aprovechar el potencial de la música y las artes en el fomento de la participación juvenil.
Ziel: leisten eines fachdidaktischen Beitrags, die Konstruktionen von Privatsphäre und schützenswerten Daten, Bedrohungen, Coping- sowie Datenschutzstrategien in typischen vier Anwendungsszenarien der Internetnutzung bei Jugendlichen besser zu verstehen.
Theoretischer Rahmen: im Rahmen einer erweiterten Protection-Motivation-Theory (Adhikari & Panda, 2018; Maddux & Rogers, 1983; Rogers, 1975; Salleh et al., 2013; Tsai et al., 2016) und des Contextual Integrity Frameworks (Nissenbaum, 2010) wird erklärt, welche Faktoren (Threats vs. Coping) hauptsächlich dazu beitragen, dass Jugendliche Schutzstrategien anwenden. Entsprechend können für den praktischen Schulunterricht thematische Schwerpunkte gesetzt, auf Basis der Conceptual Change Theorie (Jonen et al., 2003; Posner et al., 1982; Strike & Posner, 1992) sowie Shulman (1986, 2004) die Lebenswelt der Jugendlichen aufgegriffen und mittels didaktischer Rekonstruktion (Duit et al., 2012; Kattmann et al., 1997; Reinfried et al., 2009) darauf aufgebaut werden.
Design: Mit einem explorativ-sequentiellen Mixed-Method-Design konnten mittels qualitativer Experten-Interviews vier typische Internetnutzungssituationen, zahlreiche Threats, Coping- und sechs Typen von Schutzstrategien exploriert und mittels Onlinebefragung quantisiert werden (Skalen Threats, Rewards, Self-Efficacy, Response Efficacy, Data Protection Behavior, eigene Skalen aus den qualitativen Findings).
Ergebnis: Die klassische PMT bestätigt sich bei Jugendlichen. Wir differenzieren diese über die vier Nutzungsszenarien aus. Wir zeigen eine Vielfalt an Datenschutzverhalten, Bedrohungskonzepten und weiteren subjektiven Sichtweisen zum Thema Privatsphäre und Datenschutz, die die bestehende Literatur bestätigen und teilweise erweitern. Und wir präsentieren konkrete Prädiktoren für Datenschutzverhalten aus der Lebenswelt von Jugendlichen.
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Previous studies have focused on why people use Facebook and on the effects of ‘‘Facebooking’’ on well being. This study focused more on how people use Facebook. An international sample of 1,026 Facebook users (284 males, 735 females; mean age = 30.24) completed an online survey about their Facebook activity. Females, younger people, and those not currently in a committed relationship were the most active Facebook users, and there were many age-, sex-, and relationship-related main effects. Females spent more time on Facebook, had more Facebook friends, and were more likely to use profile pictures for impression management; women and older people engaged in more online family activity. Relationship status had an impact on the Facebook activity of males, but little effect on the activity of females. The results are interpreted within a framework generated by an evolutionary perspective and previous research on the psychology of gossip.
The Five Factor Model of personality has been used extensively in the management and psychology fields to predict attitudes and behaviors. Only recently have researchers begun to examine the role of psychological factors in influencing an individual’s use of technology platforms, such as Facebook. This study uses both a survey of Facebook users and actual Facebook data to uncover why some individuals are more involved in Facebook than others. 219 undergraduate students participated in a survey that assessed their personality and their reported usage of Facebook. Of these, 143 voluntarily befriended the investigator, which gave her access to their actual Facebook sites and objective data on their number of friends, photos, and wall postings. Results showed personality to explain significant amounts of variance over and above gender and Facebook experience in terms of actual number of Facebook friends, the nature of their wall postings and on their level of regret for inappropriate Facebook content.
Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness—the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource would afford completely novel ways for representing and reasoning about web users and people in general. This paper narrates the theory and technique of such a feat—the natural language text of 100,000 social network profiles were captured, mapped into a diverse ontology of music, books, films, foods, etc., and machine learning was applied to infer a semantic fabric of taste. Taste fabrics bring us closer to improvisational manipulations of meaning, and afford us at least three semantic functions— the creation of semantically flexible user representations, cross-domain taste-based recommendation, and the computation of taste-similarity between people—whose use cases are demonstrated within the context of three applications—the InterestMap, Ambient Semantics, and IdentityMirror. Finally, we evaluate the quality of the taste fabrics, and distill from this research reusable methodologies and techniques of consequence to the semantic mining and Semantic Web communities.
Contrasting hypotheses were posed to test the effect of Facebook exposure on self-esteem. Objective Self-Awareness (OSA) from social psychology and the Hyperpersonal Model from computer-mediated communication were used to argue that Facebook would either diminish or enhance self-esteem respectively. The results revealed that, in contrast to previous work on OSA, becoming self-aware by viewing one's own Facebook profile enhances self-esteem rather than diminishes it. Participants that updated their profiles and viewed their own profiles during the experiment also reported greater self-esteem, which lends additional support to the Hyperpersonal Model. These findings suggest that selective self-presentation in digital media, which leads to intensified relationship formation, also influences impressions of the self.
Many youth have recently embraced online social networking sites such as MySpace (myspace.com) to meet their social and relational needs. While manifold benefits stem from participating in such web-based environments, the popular media has been quick to demonize MySpace even though an exponentially small proportion of its users have been victimized due to irresponsible or naive usage of the technology it affords. Major concerns revolve around the possibility of sexual predators and pedophiles finding and then assaulting adolescents who carelessly or unwittingly reveal identifiable information on their personal profile pages. The current study sought to empirically ascertain the type of information youth are publicly posting through an extensive content analysis of randomly sampled MySpace profile pages. Among other findings, 8.8% revealed their full name, 57% included a picture, 27.8% listed their school, and 0.3% provided their telephone number. When considered in its proper context, these results indicate that the problem of personal information disclosure on MySpace may not be as widespread as many assume, and that the overwhelming majority of adolescents are responsibly using the web site. Implications for Internet safety among adolescents and future research regarding adolescent Internet use are discussed.
Facebook is quickly becoming one of the most popular tools for social communication. However, Facebook is somewhat different from other Social Networking Sites as it demonstrates an offline-to-online trend; that is, the majority of Facebook Friends are met offline and then added later. The present research investigated how the Five-Factor Model of personality relates to Facebook use. Despite some expected trends regarding Extraversion and Openness to Experience, results indicated that personality factors were not as influential as previous literature would suggest. The results also indicated that a motivation to communicate was influential in terms of Facebook use. It is suggested that different motivations may be influential in the decision to use tools such as Facebook, especially when individual functions of Facebook are being considered.