Teenagers' use of uncertainty reduction strategies on social network sites in the offline network

This paper presents the results of a study concerning the use of profile pages by adolescents to get to know more about friends and acquaintances known from offline life. Previous research has indicated that social network sites are used to gather information on new online contacts. However, several studies have demonstrated a substantial overlap between offline and online social networks. Hence, we question whether online profile connections are meaningful in gathering information on these 'offline' friends and acquaintances. First of all, the results indicate that the combination of passive uncertainty reduction (monitoring a target's profile) and interactive uncertainty reduction (communication through the target's profile) explains a considerable amount of variance in the level of uncertainty about both friends and acquaintances. More specifically, adolescents generally get to know much more about their acquaintances. Second, it shows that the results of online uncertainty reduction positively affect the degree of self-disclosure, which is imperative in building a solid friend relation. Furthermore, we find that uncertainty reduction strategies positively mediate the effect of social anxiety on the level of certainty about friends. This implies that socially anxious teenagers benefit from SNS in order to get the conditions right to build a more solid relation with their friends. Hence, we conclude that SNS play a substantial role in today's adolescents' everyday interpersonal communication