Have Facebook friends who constantly post nearly everything about their personal lives to the point of becoming so annoying for oversharing? Don’t hate just yet, because a new study suggests they could be lonely.
The study, conducted by Charles Sturt University (CSU) researchers in Australia, intends to establish if there’s a relationship between being lonely and self-disclosure in social networking sites such as Facebook. The latest study is one of the several studies previously reported that similarly established a relationship between social media participation and loneliness or depression.
“The results of this study have shown that more ‘lonely’ people disclosed their Personal Information, Relationship Information, and Address than ‘connected’ people and more ‘connected’ people disclosed their Views and their Wall than ‘lonely’ people,” the study states.
The researchers gathered their data from 616 female Facebook users with publicly available profiles online, half of which was categorized as “connected” and the other half as “lonely” based on latest wall post that clearly stated such emotion.
Study reveals that 98 percent of Facebook users who said they were lonely publicly listed their relationship status, with a certain number of users even sharing their home addresses. It also shows that 79 percent of these lonely Facebook users also divulged other personal information, for instance their favorite book or film, as opposed to less than 65 percent of the connected users.
“It makes sense that the people who felt lonely would disclose this type of information," study’s co-author Yeslam Al-Saggaf, who is associate professor at the School of Computing and Mathematics in CSU, said. “They want to make it easier for others to initiate contact with them, which may help them overcome their feelings of loneliness.”
He says that publicly revealing such sensitive, personal information on social networking sites is, however, a concern.
“Coupled with other information, such as Relationship Status and Favourite Movies, which ‘lonely’ people also tended to disclose, the potential for harm from stalking and harassment, for example, is real and possibly serious,” he elaborates.
Meanwhile, Facebook users who felt connected or who don’t openly state their loneliness on the social network tend to share their religious and political views as opposed to users who felt lonely.
Al-Saggaf also believes all findings of their study are also equally applicable to male Facebook users.
The study titled Self-disclosure on Facebook among female users and its relationship to feelings of loneliness was co-authored by Sharon Nielsen, director of the Quantitative Consulting Unit at CSU Research Office. The Computers in Human Behavior journal first published said study online and will come out in print by July 2014.
