The Development of Online Friendship Scale

This article discusses concept and measurement of online friendship in an Indonesian context. Online friendship is considered to be superficial due to the lack of face-to-face interaction and emotional intimacy. Based on grounded theory research, online friendship consists of five dimensions: caution, voluntariness, companionship,sharing, and mutualsupport (Study 1). UGM’s Online Friendship Scale was developed as measurement of online friendship (Study 2). Initial set of items was administered to university students (N = 42) and resulted in 21 reliable items (r = .408-.687). Construct validity testing was appropriately used for the data (Bartlett’s Test = 1174.1 (p<.05), KMO values = .837). CFA confirms that the online friendship scale is multidimensional. The factor loads came up with four dimensions: sharing (30.197%), voluntariness (8.576%), companionship (8.256%), and mutual support (7.769%). Sharing (information and knowledge) wasthe dimension with highest contribution, indicating online friendship serves more as means of networking between users rather than social bonding