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.

心理学研究仍常依赖问卷法收集数据。尽管普适计算与互联网技术已广泛普及，这类问卷调研仍多以纸笔与剪贴板的方式开展。若采用互联网渠道，则以Survey Monkey这类批量问卷服务商提供的独立问卷系统为常态。针对社交网络中在线披露行为的相关研究，我们开发了一款定制化在线问卷平台，旨在提升参与者参与度，并支持跨研究的数据关联——即PsyQu.com。PsyQu是一款基于数据库构建的现代化网站，因此具备规范的数据模式（schema）。该数据结构对研究项目、研究者与参与者进行封装，支持参与者通过单一账号关联其参与多项研究的多轮数据，从而为开展跨关联研究与纵向研究提供了可能。通过摆脱独立问卷系统的局限，我们期望发掘在线行为与其他心理维度间的新型关联与预测模式。目前该平台处于阿尔法测试（alpha testing）阶段，仅面向1组研究者开放，涵盖3项研究：社会资本、在线自我表露与人格特质。在社会资本研究中，我们采用标准化量表对在线社会资本与社会信任展开调研，旨在探明不同群体间的差异。为对比在线调研结果，我们同时开展了纸笔问卷调研——因学界对在线参与的可靠性尚存争议。本研究将对该平台及社会资本研究的初步结果进行展示。