Hello. I’m Gabby Hoefer and today I will be talking about online social support and the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is no denying that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on our lives.
With the rise of remote work and social distancing, the pandemic has limited our ability to interact
with others in-person, and forced many to move online for work, education, and support.
Meanwhile, studies have shown increased psychological stressors in response to the pandemic.
Stay-at-home orders and social distancing have also been found to correlate with increased
feelings of loneliness and decreased social support.
Previous studies have shown conflicting results with regard to the relationship between online
communication and feelings of loneliness and social support.
The lack of in-person interactions by many during the pandemic provides us with an opportunity
to understand how shifting to specifically seeking support online, affects one’s feelings of social support.
In this paper, we look at dimensions of communication through the lens of two frameworks.
First we use the Interpersonal Connection Behaviors Framework, and then the Social
Compensation Hypothesis to understand how various dimensions of interaction change social
support dynamics during the pandemic.
In this study, we ask 5 research questions.
But for the sake of time, we will only be reporting on two in this presentation.
Those questions being ”What are the different effects on perceived social support and loneliness between public and private online platforms?”
and “Is self-disclosure of emotional state effective at cultivating positive social support when compared to time spent on online platforms?”
To investigate these questions, we gathered survey responses from over 800 college students at US-based institutions.
Participants were recruited through emails, Reddit posts, and Facebook advertisements,
garnering an average of 24 responses from students at 97 different universities.
Demographic breakdowns can be seen in the displayed graphs.
Recruitment was adjusted to include a diverse sample of participants based on university size.
In the survey, participants were asked questions about demographics, level of physical isolation,
level of online interaction before and during the pandemic,
and were asked to complete several measures of social support and loneliness.
Using this data we were able to extract trends in feelings of social support when related
to online and in-person interaction patterns.
In our results, we were able to validate previous findings about increased online platform usage
and emotional self-disclosure during the pandemic.
As shown in this graph, online platform usage increased across the board, and emotional
self-disclosure frequency increased across all private methods of communication.
Also similarly to previous work, we found that 64% of participants felt that the pandemic
had a negative impact on their friendships.
When considering the difference between public and private communication, we found that,
while students spent the most time using public social media as compared to private chats
and calls, this was the only platform to show negative consequences with social support and loneliness.
We also find that while both frequency of self-disclosure online and amount of in-person
interaction correlate significantly with feelings of social support, frequency of self-disclosure
online is even more strongly correlated than in-person interaction.
Finally, we found that regardless of frequency of in-person interaction, additional online
self-disclosure led to greater feelings of social support.
Most prominently we see that disclosing online daily showed similar levels of social support
to interacting in-person daily.
As mentioned previously, we find a relationship between public social media use and increased feelings of loneliness.
However we also find a relationship between private online communication and decreased
feelings of loneliness as well as increased feelings of social support.
This indicates that the relationship between online communication and loneliness and social support is complex.
When considering the Interpersonal Connection Behaviors Framework,
this may imply that public social media consists primarily of “passive” interactions -
which by the Framework should have negative impacts -
while private online communication consist primarily of “active” interactions -
which by the Framework should have positive impacts.
We go into further discussion on why we may be encountering this pattern in our paper.
We also find a relationship between the frequency of emotional self-disclosure and increased
feelings of social support, particularly in one-on-one direct messaging conversations
as compared to phone or video calls.
This conflicts with previous hypotheses that people are more willing to disclose over platforms
closer to in-person communication.
We hypothesize that the privacy preserving nature of private textual communication may
contribute to user comfort and encourage disclosure.
To summarize, we find evidence that online communication can act as a substitute for
in-person interaction during periods of social isolation, such as during the COVID pandemic.
In particular, we find that willingness and frequency of emotional self-disclosure over
online platforms has a strong relationship with feelings of social support.
We also find that public platforms show less promising trends than private platforms when
looking at social support and loneliness.
Thank you so much for listening, and please feel free to reach out or ask any questions at the conference!