Gender and online friendship on facebook: the effect of gender difference in closeness of facebook links

Abstract

Friendship on Facebook is generated, in part, in the nature of psychological and sociological gender variance. In terms of friendship based upon gender, controversies on female privilege in friendship vs. male privilege in friendship have been brought over. Moreover, previous studies have struggled to discern which gender holds the superiority over the online networks. Hereupon, the research strives to utilize Friendship Closeness Data Application (FCDA) on Facebook to scrutinize relationship features within social network service in terms of gender difference and dominance. With data collected from 96 KAIST students and their 30 closest friends, data analysis was made. As a consequence, the statistical significance on gender privilege and difference, associated to social relationship and friendship on Facebook, is analyzed based on ANOVA mean comparison. Thereby, male-centered friendship is detected; male is considered to more actively generate social capitals on the virtuality.