Social Networks: a medium for dealing with loneliness?

Abstract

The present study, titled “Social Networks: a medium for dealing with loneliness?”, has been carried out by Chrysanthy Michael, a postgraduate student of the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology, under the supervision of the lecturer Andrew Laghos and has been completed in December 2014. The objective of this research was to determine whether Social Networking Sites (SNS) such as Facebook can help or not lonely people to overcome their feelings of loneliness. The study comprised qualitative and quantitative data that was collected through questionnaires, interviews and observation. The questionnaire was designed in such a way so as to evaluate the students’ degree of loneliness and the degree of their use of Facebook. Through the interviews and the observation it was sought to confirm or refute the data yielded by the questionnaires’ analysis. Additionally, these were the two methods that contributed to the explanation of some of the quantitative results that were retrieved. Lonely people tend to be more social on Facebook, a behaviour they, however, do not maintain in their real lives. The results and the conclusions, as well as the observations that were made based on the lonely students’ profiles, are reported in the study.