A study on determinants of friendship relations in social networks

Nowadays, individuals spend more time in the virtual environment that expressed as social media, meet their different needs in here and see this virtual world as a part of their daily life. Especially, young people use social networks very intensely in order to establish new friendships, to communicate more with each other and to share with each other. As a result of these features, young people who see social media as an element of socialization initiate friendship relations in social networks, develop friendships and end up because of various reasons. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites among social networking sites. The study was conducted between March and April 2017. The aim of this study is to reveal the factors that affect to the initiation and termination of friendships in social networks as well as the general Facebook usage habits of individuals. In accordance with this aim, web-based questionnaire and experimental research method were applied. Fictitious Facebook accounts were created for the experimental research method. A beauty test questionnaire was applied to determine the profile photographs to be used in these accounts. The genders, profile photos, education and relationship situations of these fictitious accounts are organized differently from each other. In this way, these four dimensions have been measured the effect on the behavior of accepting friendship request and unfriending behaviour. In addition, differences in accepting friendship request and unfriending behavior according to the demographic characteristics of the participants were tested. Friendship requests were sent to participants both in the natural environment and in the laboratory environment through the fictitious Facebook accounts, and the results were monitored and analyzed. According to the results of the research, men are more eager to share posts than women. In addition to, users who are friends with their parents on social networks are more careful sharing to something. Almost a third of the users have more than one Facebook accounts. The ratio of male to accept friend requests from people they did not know was found to be higher than women. However, it has been seen that gender, profile photograph, education and relationship status of the account that sent request has no effect on accepting participants' friendship requests and unfriending. The study was founded that accepting behaviour the friendship request of participants could be differentiated in terms of natural (field) and laboratory environments. Key Words: social network, friendship, unfriending, facebook