Age Differences in Online Communication: How College Students and Adults Compare in Their Perceptions of Offensive Facebook Posts

With the most recent US Presidential election, civility in online communication hasresurfaced as a social issue. Asurvey of 409 college students and 190 faculty / staff at a liberal arts college in northeastern Pennsylvania used open-ended questions to identifythe typesof communicative posts people of different ages have seen and considered offensive on Facebook. Content analysisidentified twenty unique themes of online inappropriateness, many of whichare similar across age groups butdo not appear in previous research. comments, sex / nudity, political references, and offending visuals. Age differences emerge in the rankings of these four themes and in the identified fifth theme, which is “other social issues” among college students and foul language for adults. Findings also indicate that students were statistically more likely than adults to consider posts involving traditional social issues (racism, sexism, LGBT issues, and alcohol / drugs) or aggression to be offensive; and, adults were more likely to consider foul language or the discussion of politics or religion to be offensive. Symbolic interaction theory is used to link perceptions of offensive posts to judgments of others, and suggestions for further research are discussed.


Literature Review
Younger and older people exhibit different behavioral norms in areas such as alcohol consumption, sexuality, nudity, and language both on and off-line. For example, many college students believe that college is a place to party and to drink alcohol (Lo, 2000;Marciszewski, 2006); and, students tend to think that visible participation in these behaviors is necessary to be socially accepted,even in a person does not participate in the behavior. Consequently young adults may be more likely than more mature adults to communicate these behaviors onlinein order to gain acceptance (Birmbaum, 2013;Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011;Ehrenreichet al., 2014;Lo, 2000;Shinew & Parry, 2005). There is some evidence for this. Peluchette and Karl (2007) studied 200 Facebook profiles and found that 42% had comments about alcohol and 53% had photos about alcohol use. The same study looked at what people posted on each other's profiles and found that 50% of the posts involved partying. More mature adults may be less likely to feel peer pressure to drink alcohol or to post their experiences; and, therefore, may also be less inclined to feel that such behavior should be communicated online.
Theview of appropriateness of sexuality and nudity in public may also be age relatedon and offline (Fix, 2016;Hestroni, 2007;Mayo, 2013;Potts & Belden, 2009). Even though sexual behavior has become more visible, there is still controversyregarding where appropriate limits lie, and this is especially evident based on age. Younger Facebook users may be more tolerant of sex and nudity in public and online than those who are older; and, young adults, like college students, may communicate this by posting sexual references or nudity because they think that this is what their friends are doing or they think these behaviors are also expected to be "cool" (Ehrenreich et al., 2014;Goodmonet al.,2014;Peluchette & Karl, 2007). Other behaviors, such as swearing, comments on different social issues, and how people present themselves online may also be age differentiated, as people of different ages may have different views on issues or different norms of self-presentation; however, this is not examined in an online environment (Chirico, 2014). tragiconline disclosures astoo much sharing, and therefore, were inappropriate. Roche and colleagues (2015) furthered this study by asking 150 college students to react to the level of appropriateness of mock Facebook feeds created after an informal poll of 20 college students.
These feeds focused on romantic relationship drama, negative emotion, passive aggression, and frequent status updates. Thefindings revealed that posts involving relationship drama were perceived as the most inappropriate, followed by passive aggressive posts. These findings support those of Brandtzaeg and colleagues (2010) regarding the self-disclosure norm violation of sharing too much, as personal information sharing in public is dubbed "too much information" or "TMI". However, according to their findings, negative emotion posts, frequent status updates and neutral posts were all deemed as relatively appropriate.
While an important step, these studies are limited in a few ways. First, they all involve college students' perceptions. However, many college students are Facebook friends with other individuals, especially family members and co-workers and therefore need to communicate with people in a variety of different networks. Because the norms of college behavior differ from adult norms in many ways, perceptions of what is appropriate to communicate on Facebook and how may differ as well;but, this is unstudied.Second, the methods of previous studiesgenerally involve hypothetical Facebook walls or posts. Both Bazarova (2012) and Roche and colleagues (2015)use quantitative analyses of student reactions to hypothetical researcher created Facebook posts or feeds. Therefore, the type of topic covered was decided by the researcher. Roche and colleagues (2015) did pick their topics after an informal poll of 20 students;but, this approach, while an improvement over purely researcher driven scenarios, isstill limited. Twenty students is a very small sample and may be biased. A larger sample of students may identifynew topics considered to be inappropriate for Facebook, but this is unable to be examined when researchers select the posts to be studied. Wolfer (2016), using focus groups who did not respond to preconceived scenarios, built on Roche's and Bazarova's studies by taking a more qualitative approach to determining what college students identified as inappropriate online communication.
Wolferfound that college students also felt that negative comments about social issues, such as race and gay marriage, or communications that were purposely embarrassing or mean were inappropriate on Facebook. While Wolfer's study did build on these previous ones by being qualitative and by identifying additional themes of inappropriateness, her study is vulnerable to the same limitation of Bazarova's (2012) and Roche and colleagues (2015) of only considering college students; and, additionally, by using focus groups, it is limited to a small sample of only 46 college students.
The desire to use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to foster interpersonal relationships in many different contexts (family, friends, work), and to present a positive selfimage to others,all in the context of the diverse social networks common on Facebook, point to the importance of understanding what types of Facebook posts users of different ages view as inappropriate. From a symbolic interactionist framework, people rely on the symbolic meanings of their interaction with others to learn the appropriate behavior for their group and these interpretations are situationally dependent (Blumer, 1969;Thomas, 1931). People will act towards others based on the identified situation and the corresponding meanings that they attribute to other's actions and communication in that situation (Blumer, 1960;Thomas, 1931).
When consensus in situations is high, the meaning of the symbol communicated is clear; when consensus is low, the meaning becomes ambiguous and communication becomes problematic (Thomas, 1931). Given the diverse age networks on Facebook and the ways people of different ages use Facebook, people's attributed meanings in online communication may also differ. This is especially relevant because researchers have found that sharing even a small amount of negatively perceived information leads to a negative view of the individual doing the sharing (Goodmon et al., 2014;Steeves & Regan, 2014).However, as mentioned previously, studies of Facebook not only to follow other people's lives, but also to keep tabs on their children, who may be posting behaviors to impress their peers, but which are contrary to the values adults tried to instill (Brandtzaeg et al., 2010;Steeves& Regan, 2014). Furthermore, adult Facebook users may be co-workers or people who may serve as professional social networks for younger Facebook users; therefore, identifying inappropriate posts may also have long term benefit to Facebook and consider to be inappropriate based on age. Specifically, this study has two research purposes: 1)to identify the top five posts identified by college students and by adults as inappropriate for Facebook; and, 2) to see whether there are any statistically significant age differences in perceptions of inappropriateness overall.

Methods and Sample
An online survey via a Survey Monkey link was administered to a population of undergraduate students (n=3,713), faculty (n=306), and staff (n=610) at a small liberal arts college in northeastern Pennsylvania regarding their Facebook experiences. The student response rate was 14.1% (n=572) and the faculty / staff response rate was 20.8% (n=190), which is less than desirable. Like the university from which the data was collected, the majority of both the student and the adult sample is female ( Three quarters of the adult sample has at least a four year college degree (75.8%).
More than three quarters of the student respondents (78.7%) and all but one of the adult respondents had a Facebook account at the time of the study. Similar proportions of students and adults report being on Facebook multiple times a day (54.4% of students and 53.2% of adults).
Of the 572 responding students, 409 of them listed at least one inappropriate issue they saw on Facebook, while all of the 190 faculty / staff made some type of comment describing this. Less than 10% of both students and adults (1.2% of students and 7.9% of adults) claim that they have never seen any offensive Facebook posts.

Design
The participation. Surveys and respondents were tracked separately by unique identifiers which enabled the researcher to know what students, faculty, and staff responded to the study, but did not allow the researcher to link respondents to individual survey responses. Even though colleg students are young adults, for ease of writing, they are referred to as either "younger Facebook users" or "students", while the faculty and staff will be collectively referred to as "adults".
This research utilizes open coding where descriptive labels were written for every reference of inappropriate post seen on Facebook. First the author read through all responses and color coded like statements into themes, simultaneously making a codebook. Individual respondents received a "1" if a comment related to a particular theme in the codebook and a "0" if it did not.
Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies Volume: 7 -Issue: 4 October -2017 Sometimes two or more comments received only one code. For example, when listing the top three offensive posts seen, if an individual put "comments about gays" as one comment and "comments about transgender individuals" as a second comment, they both apply to lesbian / gay / bisexual / transgender individuals (LGBT), so even though there are two comments, they can only receive one code of "1" for the theme " LGBT issues". Similarly, some comments may have received more than one code. For example, a response of "racist comments against President Obama" would receive both a "1" for the theme of "racism" and a "1" for the theme of  Table 1.
A second independent evaluator coded the same data using the coding themes developed. Interrater reliability was established via Cohen's kappa since the themes were categorical in nature.
Originally 10 of the 20 items had a Cohen's kappa of .8 or higher indicating very strong interrater reliability (McHugh, 2012;Viera & Garrett,2005). For the remaining 10 categories, the raters discussed the areas of individual areas of discrepancy for each respondent until agreement in coding was reached and changed accordingly on the master data set. The mutually decided themes have a Cohen's kappa of 1 since they were discussed until agreement was reached. The respective Cohen's kappa for each theme also appears in Table 1.

Research Question 1: Top Five Inappropriate Themes
For the most part, students and adults do not differ in their identification of the top five themes they have seen on Facebook and deem inappropriate, even though they may differ in the relative rankings of the five. groups even though the number one for the two groups differ. However, students were more likely to mention seeing inappropriate presentations of various social issues (beyond those which are their own category) in their top fivethan the adult sample, and the adults were more likely to see and consider foul language on Facebook to be inappropriate.
There are other age differences as well further down the rankings. For example, religion, general comments of hate, animal cruelty, private issues made public, and posts that the reader interprets as ignorant or lying appear in the top 10 for adults, but not for college students. Similarly, violence appears in the top 10 for college students, but not for adults. This suggests that while some topics are so inappropriate for Facebook they are agreed upon by both students and adults, differing age norms do exist.

Research Question 2: Statistically Significant Age Differences
While respondents may, for the most part, agree on the top five offensive themes, this does not necessarily mean that they agree to the same degree. Chi-square analysis reveals that college students identified a greater number of overall themes witnessed and deemed inappropriate than the older cohort. Of the 11 themes where statistically significant age differences emerged, college students were more likely to identify seven of them as inappropriate. For example, college students are more likely than adults to consider Facebook posts relating to specific traditional social issuesto be inappropriate. Students were statistically more likely than older adults to see and be offended by posts about racism (35.9% compared to 21.1%, p<.01, Table 2), sexism (13.8%, 5.9%, p<.01), LGBT issues (10.3%, 4.2%, p<.05), alcohol / drugs (5.1%, 1.1%, p<.05), and "other social issues" (16.4%, 9.5%, p<.05). College students are also more likely than adults to see and be offended by posts indicating some type of aggression or violence.
College students were twice as likely to see posts about aggression to children that they find offensive (16.1%) compared to adults (6.8%, p<.01). Likewise, 1 in 10 college students have seen some type of violent post (10.5% ) where less than half of that (3.7%, p<.01) of adults claim the same.
On the other hand, adult Facebook users were more likely to see and define posts that relate to other types of controversy, such as political discourse or foul language to be inappropriate.
Almost one quarter of adults (26.3%) compared to less than 20% (18.3%) of college students (p<.05) saw political posts that they claimed were inappropriate. Furthermore, adults were twice as likely (21.6%) than students (11.5%, p<.01)to see and consider foul language on Facebook to be inappropriate. Adults were also more likely to see and define posts involving religion(11.1% compared to 5.1%, p<.01) or posts that were "rants" as inappropriate (4.2% compared to 1.5%, p<.05).

Discussion
The concern for civility and appropriate onlinecommunication is not new (Calhoon, 2000;Thorne, 2015). Given Facebook's popularity, the diverse social networks on Facebook, and the variability in normative behavior across groups, different groups of people are likely to consider different behaviors on Facebook to be offensive. What these behaviors are though is unclear and generally un-studied. This is an significant topic because negative interpretations of Facebook Second, contrary to obvious age differences in face-to-face behavior in various areas (Fix, 2016;Mayo, 2013;Potts & Belden, 2009) five themes identifiedrace, sexuality / nudity, politics, and offensive visualsare common to both age groups. This similarity is remarkably consistent when considering that these were selfidentified topics that were not prompted by the researcher.
Nevertheless, similar does not mean equal. Age differences did emerge. For example, college students were more offended by communication about additional ("other") social issues than were adults and adults were more likely than college students to consider foul language on Facebook to be inappropriate, the latter of which is supported by research in face-to-face interaction (Chirico, 2014). Statistically the younger cohort, possibly contrary to expectations, also identified a greater number of themes witnessed and deemed inappropriate examples of online communication than did the older cohort. Students were more likely than older adultsidentify posts about racism, sexism, LGBT issues, and alcohol / drugs as inappropriate.
These differences are not completely unexpected as they mirror the types of issues frequently discussed and analyzed on college campuses. If, as Shoenberger and Tandoc (2014) argue, college students use Facebook to explore their views and try and influence others, then it follows that their posts may reflect material that they are encountering in their classes. Research here and by Wolfer (2016), however, suggests that using Facebook to test one's views or influence others about issues learned on campus, may not be well-received by others, especially peers, since these types of communicative posts were deemed inappropriate on Facebook.
On the other hand, adult Facebook users were statistically more likely to see and define posts regarding political discourse, foul language, religious views, or posts that were "rants" as inappropriate. Age differences involving the use of foul language and rants suggests that adults have different norms for self-presentationin online communication than do college students (Chirico 2014). While no research has examined people's views of rants on or off-line, it is feasible to link rants to inappropriate self-presentation, given that Facebook, especially among older individuals, is generally used for more entertaining purposes (Leung, 2013 are particularly likely to see politics as controversial and, therefore a violation of Facebook's "real" purpose of entertainment (Leung, 2013 (Goodmon et al., 2014;Oldmeadowet al., 2013;Steeves& Regan, 2014 Roche et al., 2015), but expanding the topics of these posts given the findings of this study. This can be followed with asking respondents whether they have actually seen any of the posts described.Second, future research might want to explore why people of different ages find these types of posts inappropriate. This will give more insight to understanding the dynamics between Facebook motivation (e.g. entertainment and social connectedness) and emerging values involved inFacebook use. Last, this sample and the population from which it was drawn are rather homogenous in terms of race and gender; and, has a relatively low response rate. Using a qualitative approach with a different population may identify other themes or suggest more group differences in themes that Facebook users deem to be inappropriate.