Predicting social capital by mining Facebook data

Psychology still relies often on questionnaires to gather data. Despite ubiquitous computing and internet, these are often still conducted with paper and clipboard. Where the internet is used, standalone questionnaires from bulk providers like Survey Monkey are the norm. For our studies related to social networks on online disclosure, we have developed a custom site for online questionnaires, designed to engage participants and allow linking of data from one study to the next – PsyQu.com PsyQu is a modern website developed around a database and as such has a ‘schema’. This data structure encapsulates the project, researcher(s) and participant(s) in a manner that allows for participants to link multiple attempts at multiple studies under their single account. This will allow cross-linked and longitudinal studies to be performed. By moving beyond standalone questionnaires, we hope to discover new correlative and predictive patterns between online behavior and other psychological dimensions. At present, the site is in alpha testing mode with only 1 group of researchers and 3 studies: social capital, online self-disclosure and personality. In the social capital study, we used a standard scale for investigating online social capital and social trust, in an attempt to find out differences between various groups. A paper survey was also conducted in order to compare with the online survey since there has been debate on the reliability of online participation. We will present the website, initial results of the social capital study.