A popular saying with students – “It’s not official until it’s on Facebook,” – may be more accurate than people realize.
A study co-conducted by David Westerman, assistant professor of communication studies at West Virginia U., showed publicly displaying romantic relationships on Facebook is a sign of commitment.
“It’s very similar to wearing a wedding ring. You’re publicly showing people ‘look I’m connected to this other person. I’m letting everyone know,’” Westerman said. “If you show it publicly, it makes it that much more meaningful.”
Just as social media has become a way to connect with friends and family, they have also become a tool to build and maintain relationships.
“For me, it came about from seeing social networking sites as being this place where a lot of these things can play out,” Westerman said. “(How they are) providing opportunities for people who live apart but also who live relatively close to each other, to maintain relationships by communicating through these channels.”
Alongside Stephanie Tong of Wayne State U. in Detroit, Westerman investigated how the nature of romantic relationships are affected by Facebook.
Westerman put up an ad on MIX in September looking for people currently involved in a romantic relationship with someone they are friends with on Facebook.
In the study, 306 participants were asked a series of questions about how satisfied they were with their communication on Facebook and how supported they felt by their network.
“We asked them some questions about how they interact with their partner through the private parts of Facebook and through the public part,” Westerman said. “We wanted to see how they played some of these things out on Facebook.”
Westerman and Tong are still analyzing the results of the study, and no statistics have been released.
What the preliminary results of the study show is people who display their relationship more openly on Facebook tend to feel closer to one another than people who don’t.
Westerman believes the idea of being “Facebook official” may play more significant role than many think.
“If you’re doing this publicly, you’re showing that commitment,” Westerman said. “Everyone else in your network knows it, and they can call you on it if you do something stupid.”
The private interactions on Facebook, including messaging and chatting, don’t seem to play as big a role in relationships – to Westerman’s surprise.
“It might be that people don’t just do it very often,” Westerman said. “Facebook is meant to be a public channel, although it certainly has some private parts to it.”
Westerman said he is satisfied with the results of the study, as they prove much of the criticism of social networking sites is unwarranted.
“A lot of people say: ‘These kids today – they’re only interacting on Facebook, and they’re not having real relationships,’ This study shows that might not be the case,” Westerman said.
Westerman and Tong are hoping to finalize their research by early November.