Natural disasters bring us closer together (on Facebook, at least)

After a hurricane, students didn't make friends outside their existing circles.

by Roheeni Saxena 

Would this make you want to find some new friends?

Jocelyn Augusitno/FEMA

In a study published recently in PNAS, researchers concluded that students affected by natural disasters show changes in their Facebook behavior that would suggest they’re strengthening their social relationships with other in-group members. They believe that students affected by disaster are more likely to use Facebook to connect to others within their social circle as opposed to students unaffected by disaster, who use Facebook to expand their social circle.
In September of 2008, Hurricane Ike cut a path through the center of the US, moving through Louisiana and Texas up through the Midwestern states and finally dissipating over Michigan. The areas affected by this storm were not accustomed to hurricanes, but Ike wasn’t overly disruptive. Institutions in these areas were able to resume basic services within weeks of the Hurricane’s making landfall, and few communities were relocated or displaced by the storm.
But did the storm affect people in less practical ways? This study examined the post-Ike Facebook habits of 1.5 million college students enrolled in 130 US universities. In their study design, the researchers conceptualized the hurricane as equivalent to a randomly occurring event and therefore treated it as though it were a randomized intervention. Consequently, they categorize their study as a natural experiment.
The students came from universities that were placed into matched pairs so that those from affected institutions were compared to similar institutions that were unaffected.
The researchers found that after the hurricane hit, students attending affected universities were more likely to connect with friends-of-friends than those who attended unaffected schools. This suggests that students enrolled in affected schools were using Facebook to connect with more in-group members. Students at unaffected institutions were using Facebook primarily to expand into new social circles, effectively decreasing segregation among social groups The analysis also showed that students who were affected by the storm primarily sent Facebook messages to a smaller number of recipients when compared to peers at institutions that were unaffected.
The authors think their findings show that students who experienced the hurricane formed more tightly knit social relationships than those who did not and that students at universities that were affected focused on interactions with fewer people, whereas those at unaffected universities engaged in broader social outreach. The researchers found their findings to be true in both the short term and the long term, up to three years after the hurricane.
The findings in this study are challenging to interpret and generalize. The subjects in this study are college students enrolled in universities, which means their Facebook behavior may not be representative of the population at large, or even of adults in their same age group who are working and not enrolled in university. Universities themselves are complex communities with distinct characteristics, so these findings likely couldn’t be generalized outside of the university setting.
Additionally, the universities included in the group of “affected” schools were all Midwestern universities, a consequence of the path of Hurricane Ike, whereas the universities in the “unaffected” group represented a larger number of geographic regions in the US. Since different regions in the US have distinct cultural characteristics, these findings may be complicated by the social expectations associated with the geographic regions included in each group.
While the findings of this study may not be widely generalizable, they do suggest the value in further examining social phenomena using Facebook as a data source. As Facebook and social media become increasingly enmeshed in online lives, many aspects of real life are affected, including the spread of disease, consumption behavior, and productivity, to name a few. Further analysis of the large scale data set available in Facebook could allow researchers to discovery how changes in online social behavior are influenced by real life events, providing eventual insight into the recursive relationship between our lives online and off.