Social capital and privacy online: an urban community on a social networking site

Project leader: Olessia Koltsova

Project participants: Yury Rykov, Yadviga Sinyawskaia, Maxim Koltsov

Social networks provide many opportunities for users to communicate contributing to the accumulation of their social capital.  However, they also give rise to various privacy risks - especially considering that communication networks are usually built within the same city or nearby rural area, where it's hard to keep the confidenciality.

The project aims at studying how different user online activities affect social capital. Privacy behaviour is deemed as an important factor that might produce both stimulating and inhibiting effects on user social capital. 
Both self-reported and digital traces of all Vkontakte users from a typical medium-sized Russian city were collected during the online survey. Respondents were asked about their privacy attitudes, networking behavior, social capital perception and personality traits as well. As a result, the project team expects to draw conclusions about the relationship between the personal, socio-demographic and behavioural characteristics of users with their attitude to privacy and the level of social capital both on the perceived and structural levels.  

Data collection and analysis is performed with VKMiner, Pajek, SPSS и R.


Publications:

• Koltsova O., Sinyavskaya Y., & Porshnev A., Kliegl R. Structural vs perceived social capital online: effects of privacy and relationship maintenance behaviors and attitudes. Media Psychology Journal (under review)
• Sinyavskaya Y. (2023) Privacy-protective strategies on Vkontakte Social Networking Site and its role in the formation of individual social capital. Thesis for the academic degree PhD in Sociology, HSE University.
• Синявская Я. Э. (2022) Онлайн-коммуникация в социальных медиа: как опыт утраты приватности отражается на поведении пользователей // Социальная психология и общество. 2022. Т. 13. № 1. С. 33-50.
• Sinyavskaya Y., Porshnev A. Friends network expansion and reduction: investigating the role of structural and psychological factors, in: Networks in the Global World V: Proceedings of NetGloW 2020. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems Vol. 181. Cham: Springer, 2021. P. 196-208. doi.
• Rykov, Y., Koltsova, O., & Sinyavskaya, Y. (2020). Effects of user behaviors on accumulation of social capital in an online social network. Plos one, 15(4), e0231837.  Download (PDF, 585 Кб) 
• Sinyavskaya, Y., & Porshnev, A. (2019). Propensity to make social connections and structural social capital of SNS users. Annual Review of Cybertherapy And Telemedicine 2019, 33.  Download (PDF, 152 Кб) 
• Sinyavskaya, Y., & Koltsova, O. Y. (2017). Self-disclosure online and offline: the Effect of Age. Annual Review of CyberTherapy and Telemedicine, 15, 88–91. http://www.arctt.info/volume-15-summer-2017