Title: An empirical analysis evaluating trust in social networking

Authors: Aaron M. French

Addresses: University of New Mexico, 1924 Las Lomas NE, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA

Abstract: With the increase in popularity and continued globalisation of social networking sites, it is important to define the theoretical boundaries of research in this area. While previous research has evaluated social networking trust based on the community perspective, the current study extend trust at two levels: community level trust and trust in connections made. Two data samples were used to ensure valid and reliable results on the findings. The first sample included a group of university students and the second data sample was randomly selected from a population of members within an active social networking site. The results from two samples establish a clear distinction between two levels of trust (i.e., trust in connections made and trust in the community). These results were applied to a previous study on social networking to provide an example of how these two levels can individually influence the research results.

Keywords: social networking sites; SNS; trust evaluation; social capital; user satisfaction; community level trust; connection level trust.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2015.067084

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2015 Vol.11 No.1, pp.4 - 24

Published online: 26 Jan 2015 *

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