Gender Differences In Social Media

Gender differences in the use of social media have been frequently subject to scholarly debates over the past few years. Even before the advent of SNSs, social scientists have identified significant gender differences in media use (Rosengren 1974) and daily communication patterns (Duck et al. 1991). In a similar vein, recent CMC studies have uncovered significant gender differences in mediated self-presentation (Whitty 2008), privacy concerns (Hoy & Milne 2010) and overall levels of self-disclosure on SNSs (Special & Li-Barber 2012). For example, there is some evidence that male users may be more engaged in information-disclosure, while female users may be more engaged in privacy controlling behaviours (Kuo et al. 2013). Research also finds

I am aware of the fact that this binary response option may have excluded certain people who felt that they cannot or do not wish to express their gender identity in such binary terms. Nevertheless, it was decided to prioritise analytical viability over an inclusive range of gender choices in the survey questionnaire. In the obtained sample, gender was roughly equally distributed across all ages (50.25% female), even though some demographic groups were over-sampled while others were under-sampled. In particular, there were disproportionately fewer older female respondents and a disproportionately larger number of older male respondents. To correct for this bias, it was imperative to weight the sample in all analytical steps based on target population proportions for age and gender provided by the ONS. For this purpose, probability weights were implemented to make slight adjustments for age and gender proportions through iterative proportional fitting (see Table 22 in the

This broadly reflects patterns in the studied population , albeit students seem to be overrepresented in the collected sample (37.13%). In terms of educational attainment, the sample contained a variety of responses, ranging from people with no educational qualifications (1.13%) to respondents with higher-education graduate degrees (14.25%). Based on ONS data, this indicates that the sample contains a slightly more educated group of people than the population average for 20-30 year olds in the UK. However, in the interest of parsimony, most of the analytical models in this thesis will exclude respondents’ self-reported occupational status, because it had no effect on the dependent