Researching social support on social networking sites: relevance and main challenges

Abstract

The article outlines the current state of social support research on social networking sites (SNS), which is a broad category of online services, most prominent among which currently are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, and reviews key problems that presently influence the sphere. In particular, it summarizes the patchwork of approaches to conceptualization and operationalization of the term “online social support” (social support on SNS) that is present in the extant literature on the subject, while pointing out the main challenges that have been complicating the efforts toward drawing clearer conceptual boundaries around this term. The article also extensively covers the issue of creating valid, culturally sensitive tools that measure online social support, mentioning factors related to both the limits of the existing tools and the environment that these tools are intended to measure. The peculiar nature of social networking platforms as a research environment is explained at length, including their constantly evolving state, substantial variability across different services, and the privacy and security considerations that affect which primary empirical data about the audience of social networks can be accessed by the researchers. Both the uniqueness of SNS as the medium for exchanging online social support and the importance of improving existing tools for gathering empirical data about the attitudes and behaviors of the sites’ users in order to achieve a more systematic and valid picture of online social support are substantiated. The solutions to the aforementioned problems are not the focus of this particular text. Instead, the overarching goal is to create a comprehensive examination of the issues that exist, the ways in which many of them are interlinked, and the reasons why many of them have not been resolved up to this point, despite relative maturity of the research field. This groundwork will hopefully make the search for solutions significantly more productive.