I had the pleasure earlier this summer of speaking with Anna Asker, who writes for the Swedish newspaper SvD, about our research on Facebook and Loneliness. In a nutshell, our data showed that at least with university students and the “nonymous” environment of Facebook, connectivity offline predicted connectivity online. The notion of the loner compensating for offline isolation by having millions of online friends just doesn’t apply in this situation. We presented our data at the 2009 APS annual convention, and after tweaking our instruments a bit more this past year, our paper is currently under review.
I thought Anna did a terrific job of capturing the main points of our study, and although Bing Translator has some rough spots, you can get the general idea of the article here. If you are fluent in Swedish, of course, I recommend the original site.
Anna warned me that the article had generated quite a bit of response from Swedish psychology students, and told me to expect to hear from them. That would be a pleasure!
