A REVIEW OF FACEBOOK RESEARCH 2 AbstractWith over 800 million active users, Facebook is changing the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another and share information. A rapidly growing body of research has accompanied the meteoric rise of Facebook as social scientists assess the impact of Facebook on social life. In addition, researchers have recognized the utility of Facebook as a novel tool to observe behavior in a naturalistic setting, test hypotheses, and recruit participants. However, research on Facebook emanates from a wide variety of disciplines with results being published in a broad range of journals and conference proceedings, making it difficult to keep track of various findings. And because Facebook is a relatively recent phenomenon, there still exists uncertainty about the most effective ways to do Facebook research. To address these issues, we conducted a comprehensive literature search, identifying 410 relevant articles, which we sorted into five categories: Descriptive analysis of users, motivations for using Facebook, identity presentation, the role of Facebook in social interactions, and privacy and information disclosure. The literature review serves as the foundation from which we assess current findings and offer recommendations to the field for future research on Facebook and online social networks more broadly.Keywords: Facebook, online social network, social networking sites, social network analysis, privacy, motivation, identity presentation A REVIEW OF FACEBOOK RESEARCH 3 A Review of Facebook Research in the Social SciencesThe sheer online ubiquity of Facebook is astounding. As of February 2012, Facebook has over 845 million users (more than the population of Europe) who spend more than 9.7 billion minutes per day on the site (Facebook, 2012; Rusli, 2012; for a description of Facebook, see Appendix A). Users share 4 billion pieces of content per day, including uploads of 250 million photos, and Facebook is now integrated with over seven million websites and applications (Facebook, 2012; Tsotsis, 2011). In March of 2010, Facebook passed Google to become the most visited website in the U.S., accounting for 7.07% of all U.S. web traffic (Dougherty, 2010). And Facebook's dominance extends well beyond United States, with over 80% of current users residing outside of the U.S. (Facebook, 2012). Despite having only about 3,000 employees worldwide, Facebook is valued at around $100 billion U.S. dollars (Facebook, 2012;Gertner, 2011; Siegler, 2011, Swartz, 2012. In short, since its creation in February of 2004, Facebook has become a spectacular success by creating a massive new domain in which millions of social interactions are played out every day. This burgeoning new sphere of social behavior is inherently fascinating but it also provides social scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to observe behavior in a naturalistic setting, test hypotheses in a novel domain, and to recruit participants efficiently from many countries and demographic groups.As researchers scramble to ...

Who are the people who maintain satisfying friendships? And, what are the behaviours that might explain why those people achieve high friendship satisfaction? We examined the associations between personality (self-reports and peer-reports) and friendship satisfaction (self-reports) among 434 students. We also examined whether role personality (how people act with their friends) and quantity and quality of social interactions using ecological momentary assessment mediate the associations between personality and friendship satisfaction. Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and (low) neuroticism were associated with higher levels of friendship satisfaction. These associations could not be accounted for by individual differences in role personality. In addition, our results suggest that quantity of time spent with friends and quality of friend interactions (depth of conversation, selfdisclosure and lack of emotion suppression), although associated with friendship satisfaction, do not account for the associations between trait personality and friendship satisfaction. Future research should examine other potential interpersonal processes that explain why some people are more satisfied with their friendships than others and the consequences of friendship satisfaction (e.g. for well-being).

With over 800 million active users, Facebook is changing the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another and share information. A rapidly growing body of research has accompanied the meteoric rise of Facebook as social scientists assess the impact of Facebook on social life. In addition, researchers have recognized the utility of Facebook as a novel tool to observe behavior in a naturalistic setting, test hypotheses, and recruit participants. However, research on Facebook emanates from a wide variety of disciplines, with results being published in a broad range of journals and conference proceedings, making it difficult to keep track of various findings. And because Facebook is a relatively recent phenomenon, uncertainty still exists about the most effective ways to do Facebook research. To address these issues, the authors conducted a comprehensive literature search, identifying 412 relevant articles, which were sorted into 5 categories: descriptive analysisof users, motivations for using Facebook, identity presentation, the role of Facebook in social interactions, and privacy and information disclosure. The literature review serves as the foundation from which to assess current findings and offer recommendations to the field for future research on Facebook and online social networks more broadly.

What predicts sociable behavior? While main effects of personality and situation characteristics on sociability are well established, there is little evidence for the existence of person-situation interaction effects within real-life social interactions. Moreover, previous research has focused on self-reported behavior ratings, and less is known about the partner's social perspective, i.e. how partners perceive and influence an actor's behavior. In the current research, we investigated predictors of sociable behavior in real-life social interactions across social perspectives, including person and situation main effects as well as person-situation interaction effects. In two experience-sampling studies (Study 1: N = 394, US, time-based; Study 2: N = 124, Germany, event-based), we assessed personality traits with self-and informant-reports, self-reported sociable behavior during real-life social interactions, and corresponding information on the situation (categorical situation classifications and dimensional ratings of situation characteristics). In Study 2, we additionally assessed interaction partner-reported actor behavior. Multilevel analyses provided evidence for main effects of personality and situation features, as well as small but consistent evidence for person-situation interaction effects. First, extraverts acted more sociable in general. Second, individuals behaved more sociable in low-effort/positive/low-duty situations (vs. high-effort/negative/high-duty situations). Third, the latter was particularly true for extraverts. Further specific interaction effects were found for the partner's social perspective. These results are discussed regarding their accordance with different behavioral models (e.g., Trait Activation Theory) and their transferability to other behavioral domains.

People fluctuate in their behavior as they go about their daily lives, but little is known about the processes underlying these fluctuations. In two ecological momentary assessment studies (Ns = 124, 415), we examined the extent to which negative and positive affect accounted for the within-person variance in Big Five states. Participants were prompted six times a day over six days (Study 1) or four times a day over two weeks (Study 2) to report their recent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Multilevel modeling results indicated that negative and positive affect account for most, but not all, of the within-person variance in personality states. Importantly, situation variables predicted variance in some personality states even after accounting for fluctuations in affect, indicating that fluctuations in personality states may be more than fluctuations in state affect.