Thesis Title: Subtitle

Why research adults?

As I will demonstrate in the literature review, there is a lack of sociological understanding about what adults do on Facebook or even SNS more generally. Presently the field is well populated by research with teenagers and/or those attending university in the United States of America. The reasons for this are multiple. Young people often adopt technologies like Facebook first. This was most pronounced with Facebook, as it was originally only available to people attending US colleges (Kirkpatrick 2010). This initial iteration of Facebook was then made available to high school students and then finally to the general public. It makes sense, then, that the bulk of research focuses on these demographics. Primarily, prior research has taken the form of large-scale surveys, as this allows for the mapping of general characteristics over large populations.
Previous research has emphasised the importance of SNS as part of teenagers’ (rather than adults’) friendship practices (boyd 2008; Horst 2008), and its role in the creation of social capital (Ellison, Vitak and Steinfield et al and 2011), as well as its ability to facilitate political engagement amongst youth (Kaye 2011). Considering the relative infancy of SNS, research has covered a considerable amount of ground. To date, research examining SNS has covered impression management, identity construction, social capital, political engagement and privacy (Pierce and Lovrich 2003; Blais, Craig, Pepler and Connolly 2007; Livingstone 2008; Steinfield, Ellison and Lampe 2008; Valenzuela, Park and Kee 2009). Primarily, research has shown that SNS are increasingly integrated in the daily lives of users (Hargittai and Hsieh 2011). As use of SNS become a common daily practice, the use of SNS has begun to challenge social conventions concerning the construction of identity, privacy and the way people interact in daily life (Hargittai and Hsieh 2011).
However, these studies have primarily focused on examining US college students.
Further research examining university students demonstrates that Facebook can reconfigure the relationship between physical proximity and relationship development by enabling users to maintain larger sets of weak ties (Ellison et al. 2014). Facebook does this by making ephemeral connections persistent as it lowers the cost of maintaining or re- engaging weak ties (Ellison et al. 2014). At present little is known about use outside these demographics.
In contrast to teenagers, adults are at a different stage of their life course. The questions regarding the presentation of the self and friendship are likely to have different answers. For adults, the need to establish themselves as autonomous individuals outside the family unit is no longer a pressing task. As such, the ways in which Facebook is used to present the self, may be markedly different. While teenagers have grown up with SNS as part of their social landscape, adults, whose relationships existed prior to the advent of SNS may experience the role of SNS in their friendships and other social relationships differently.
Thus, there is considerable space for examinations of adults’ SNS practices. As such, this research has sampled adults and targets those people outside the usual focus of research. Additionally, as this research was based in Australia it offers a non-US perspective to this phenomenon, something that is currently missing from the literature.