A Meta-Analysis of Social Networking Online and Social Capital

Abstract

Social networking sites offer new avenues for interpersonal communication that may enable people to build social capital. The meta-analyses reported in this paper evaluated the relationship between social network site (SNS) use and 2 types of social capital: bridging social capital and bonding social capital. The meta-analyses included data from 58 articles gathered through scholarly databases and a hand search of the early publications of relevant journals. Using a random effects model, the overall effect size of the relationship between SNS use and bridging social capital based on k = 50 studies and N = 22,290 participants was r = .32 (95% CI [.27, .37]), and the overall effect size betwee..