Longitudinal Social Grooming Transition Patterns on Facebook, Social Capital, and Well-Being

Longitudinal Social Grooming Transition Patterns on Facebook, Social Capital, and Well-Being

Social Grooming, Facebook, Longitudinal, Latent Transition Analysis, Well-Being, Social Capital, Taiwan

The longitudinal associations between Facebook use and well-being have received limited exploration with mixed results. We argue that the transition pattern of an individual’s social grooming
style based on five social grooming behaviors at different times—referred to as the social grooming
transition pattern—is the key to exploring this issue. Based on the social grooming style framework, we employed latent transition analysis through a nationally representative, three-year panel survey (N ¼ 710) in Taiwan. We found that active users remained active in social grooming behavior and had options to shift, and inactive users largely remained inactive in terms of Facebook social grooming style. The results indicated that persistent social image managers gained the most social capital and well-being, greater than persistent social butterflies and those who transitioned from image managers to social butterflies, indicating that adopting strategic social grooming styles in the long-term delivered the best social outcomes.

Jih-Hsuan Tammy Lin & Yeu-Sheng Hsieh

https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/26/6/320/6384717

Oxford University Press

8 October 2021

Sri Wahyuni

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English

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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 26 (2021)