To share or not to share : A qualitative interview study of sharing on Facebook

This Master’s thesis aims to examine how study participants reason about what they share on Facebook in order to create a deeper understanding of motivations behind sharing. Another aim is to investigate what role credibility assessments have in sharing. The previous research on information sharing and Facebook is limited. To investigate these issues, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 participants aged 20–35. Toanalyze the interviews, qualitative content analysis was used. The themes that emerged were:motivations behind sharing, what is shared, audience, professional/private, discussion and credibility assessments. The results showed that the participants’ main motivations to share something were to either influence others or to strengthen their own identity on Facebook. The clearest result is that all participants state that it is important to them that they stand for what they share. What the participants share is also strongly linked to why they share –mainly they share political posts. Most participants say that they primarily have their closes tfriends in mind when sharing. Credibility is also linked to other themes. Credibility in many cases is one of the criteria that determine what participants choose to share. The participants also said that they generally rely more on what people they know well post or share