Quantitative measures for online and traditional friendship networks: a systematic literature review.

It is well known that a network of friends can offer the possibility of establishing useful relationships
that allow the individual to be more autonomous and participative in society. On the other hand, the
absence of a friendship network is often attributed to the lack of physical spaces in which to
interact with others, but also to individual tendencies such as extroversion and friendliness, which
can influence a category of behaviours in relation to specific social contexts. Nowadays, however,
social media can offer valuable alternatives for establishing sufficient external social contacts. In
recent years, numerous scales have been developed to assess both online and traditional
friendship networks. Researchers have noted a variety of ways in which online social interactions
are similar to face-to-face interactions (Gonçalves et al., 2011; Gruzd, Wellman & Takhteyev, 2011)
and have proposed scales to measure both types of social support (Nick et al.,2018). However,
these scales have differences and not all can be used to assess both social media contexts and
more traditional sociality (Cummings, Butler & Kraut, 2002; Wright & Bell, 2003; Longman et al.,
2009). The purpose of this systematic literature review is to provide a comprehensive overview of
the various instruments that are suitable for this purpose, with an emphasis on psychometric
characteristics and the contexts in which they are used.