The Geography of Facebook Groups in the United States

TL;DR

This study explores how different types of Facebook groups in U.S. counties relate to offline social capital, revealing significant correlations between online engagement patterns and community social capital levels.

Contribution

It systematically links offline social capital measures with online Facebook group engagement patterns, identifying four distinct engagement factors and their correlations.

Findings

Four main Facebook group engagement factors identified.

Two factors correlate strongly with offline social capital.

Online engagement patterns predict offline social capital measures.

Abstract

We use exploratory factor analysis to investigate the online persistence of known community-level patterns of social capital variance in the U.S. context. Our analysis focuses on Facebook groups, specifically those that tend to connect users in the same local area. We investigate the relationship between established, localized measures of social capital at the county level and patterns of participation in Facebook groups in the same areas. We identify four main factors that distinguish Facebook group engagement by county. The first captures small, private groups, dense with friendship connections. The second captures very local and small groups. The third captures non-local, large, public groups, with more age mixing. The fourth captures partially local groups of medium to large size. The first and third factor correlate with community level social capital measures, while the second and fourth do not. Together and individually, the factors are predictive of offline social capital measures, even controlling for various demographic attributes of the counties. Our analysis reveals striking patterns of correlation between established measures of social capital and patterns of online interaction in local Facebook groups. To our knowledge this is the first systematic test of the association between offline regional social capital and patterns of online community engagement in the same regions.