Use of Facebook to Meet New People vs. Connect with Existing Offline Contacts
In order to further investigate whether usage was more motivated by prior offline
contacts or the potential to form new online contacts, we developed several items
reflecting each of these paths (see Table 3). In the former case, the items measured
whether respondents used Facebook to look up someone with whom they shared
some offline connection, such as a classmate or a friend (Cronbach’s alpha = .70). In
the latter case, our instrument included several items that tapped the use of Facebook
to make new friends without any reference to an offline connection, but these did not
correlate highly, and our final analysis incorporated only a single item measure: using
Facebook to meet new people.