A Quantitative study: Perceived social support on Facebook and its effects on self-esteem

Both social support and self-esteem play a significant role in the lives of adolescents. Through many studies, the two have been proven to be correlated. Without the two, the risk of negative development during the adolescent period are increased greatly. Although an adolescent may have many family members and peers, it is not the quantity of support, but quality of support that matters, and that would affect self-esteem. This lead the researchers to the question, does social support exist in a Social Networking Site (SNS), such as Facebook? It was then hypothesized that Facebook allows a person to perceive social support, which in turn increases self-esteem. While the Cronbach Alpha of 0.92 indicates that the constructed Facebook Social Support (FSS) scale measures something, the correlation between social support and self-esteem (r= -0.29) indicates that there is no significant relationship between the two. Furthermore, the indicators, average number of friends, post likes, status likes and photo likes also showed negative correlation (r=-0.02 r=0.01 r=-0.05 r=-0.06 respectively). While many studies show that there is a relationship between social support and self-esteem, there are also many studies that show otherwise, one of the major ones being the different effects of perceived and actual social support on self-esteem. Other variables were also taken into consideration, as these variable may have influenced the study