One of the most common social media habits recently got new academic attention at Central Michigan University.

Three professors in the School of Broadcast and Cinematic Arts at CMU —  Heather Polinsky, Patty Williamson and Trey Stohlman — recently conducted research on selfie-taking.

“I got the idea for the study while scrolling through my social media feeds, wondering what motivates some people to post selfies frequently, while others almost never post selfies,” said Williamson, an associate professor at CMU.

Williamson said she realized there weren’t many studies that looked at selfies as a form of self-disclosure and she thought it was something that should be investigated further. She also wondered if the type of self-disclosure via selfie-posting changed based on the social media used.

“That’s why we decided to ask respondents to our survey about their selfie-posting behaviors on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat,” she said.

Trey Stohlman, an assistant professor, said he got involved with the study because he was noticing students at CMU randomly stopping to take selfies, regardless of the place or time. He said he was curious about the motivators behind that.

After reviewing the work already published about selfies, the CMU team developed a survey that was based on previous research and sent the survey out to people through social media, Stohlman said. The survey contained 45 questions, he added, some regarding the frequency of posting, but the majority mapped to specific self-disclosure functions.

“Basically we used a snowball sample, posting a link to the survey on our social media accounts and asking others to share the link,” Williamson said. “That helped us get a broad age range of respondents, ranging from 18–78 years of age.”

Williamson also said there had been similar studies regarding selfies done over the years, but none with the same broad age-range in terms of the sample population they had for their study. The earlier studies also tended to focus on slightly different elements of self-disclosure on social media, she said.

“Our findings, in a nutshell, were that information storage and entertainment were the self-disclosure goals that most impact selfie-posting across social media,” he said.

The researchers also found a difference between the self-disclosure motivations involved in posting selfies to Facebook and Twitter. Relational development — helping to develop and maintain friendships, family or dating relationships, for example — was positively correlated with posting selfies to Facebook, but negatively correlated with posting selfies to Twitter.

She said this led the CMU research team to believe that people tend to view Facebook as a place to post selfies that allow them to strengthen interpersonal bonds, but Twitter might be looked at as a social medium that people don’t use as much to disclose personal information to become closer friends or to strengthen relationships.

“Surprisingly, we found no difference between genders when it came to frequency of posting,” Stohlman said. “Men were just as likely to post selfies to social media as women.”

The CMU team also found that older participants prefer to use the older social media platforms like Facebook, he said, while younger participants preferred other platforms like Snapchat.

Williamson said there will be a follow-up study that the researchers are currently working on. She noted that the team wants to be able to build on their work, examining the type of selfies people post, for example.

“Is it just a picture of an individual alone, or are other people included in the selfie? What else is included in the photo?” she said.

Published on January 25, 2017 at 9:33 pm

Contact Deniz: dsahintu@syr.edu