HCC: Small: The role of social network sites in facilitating collaborative processes

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Collaboration, when it works, optimizes the contributions of individuals, often resulting in better decisions, outcomes, and experiences than individuals working alone. Social network sites (SNSs) offer new opportunities for collaboration due to their social and technical affordances. SNS profiles enable the display of identity information, which can act as a social lubricant and help individuals initiate conversations and find common ground. Within SNSs, contact lists lower the transaction costs associated with interaction. Finally, SNSs enable access to a larger pool of individuals (and their wider and more diverse knowledge base) while also providing a context in which social capital processes serve as a mechanism for encouraging collaboration, advice-giving and information-sharing. This project will develop and test a model of SNS-enabled collaboration motivated by the following research questions: What forms of collaboration are enabled by SNSs? How do the features of SNSs affect these processes? Who uses these sites to collaborate and why?This study will examine SNS-facilitated collaborative instances using quantitative and qualitative data to provide insight into users motivations, perceptions, and conceptual frameworks. First, we will examine examples of ad-hoc collaboration among college undergraduates to explore how relationship initiation and collaboration occur, both in SNS and face-to-face contexts. Second, aggregate behavioral patterns on Facebook will be analyzed to discover and investigate modes of collaboration on the site.