The Impacts of Participating Social Networking Sites: A Study of University Students in Hong Kong and in

Social networking sites (SNS) facilitate individuals to update their profile and to interact with their close friends as well as their weak acquaintances. This study explores the impacts of these common activities. We hypothesize that these activities would boost one’s self-esteem; would maintain one’s social relationship; and would enable one to reach various information. This will result in the enhancement of one’s life satisfaction. Our empirical findings from the usage of Facebook in Hong Kong and Xiaoneiin China prove most of our hypotheses. Individuals who exert time and effort updating their Facebook/Xiaonei gain more self-esteem. Interactions with close friends are significantly related to social relationship maintenance, but not to information sharing. Furthermore, interactions with weak acquaintances have greater effects on social relationship maintenance and information sharing than the impacts from interactions with close friends. These impacts would enhance one’s life satisfaction. This study empirically supports the theoretical model of life satisfaction enhancement upon using SNS. Individuals who exert time and effort updating their Facebook/Xiaonei gain more self-esteem. Interactions with close friends are significantly related to social relationship maintenance, but not to information sharing. Furthermore, interactions with weak acquaintances have greater effects on social relationship maintenance and information sharing than the impacts from interactions with close friends. These impacts would enhance one’s life satisfaction.


Introduction Theoretical Framework
A social network refers to the set of actors and ties among individuals with others (Compton, 2005;Correll& Park, 2005). There are three essential activities among participants in a social network site: 1) interactions with close friends, 2) interactions with weak acquaintances and 3) updates on one's own webpage. Usually, interactions with close friends are initiated by the posts from one's close friends, who either update their profiles or post some photos of their recent activities in a SNS. Interactions with weak acquaintances are started by the receiving of news from some interest groups in a SNS. In this study, weak acquaintances refer to people who do not know one another well and who occasionally meet, whereas close friends are people who know one another well and meet more often. Moreover, the social networks among close friends are usually connected in both physical and virtual environments. The following discussion will elaborate the theoretical framework as shown in Figure 1  Active SNS users would easily maintain their relationships with weak acquaintances and with close friends. First, it is quite common to send greetings on special occasions such as birthdays, Thanksgiving, New Year, or Christmas via SNS (Steinfield et al., 2008). Second, active SNS users participate in social networking activities may express their moods using the rich media provided by asocial networking site. Afterwards, their friends (weak acquaintances, or close friends)in the SNS would leave messages on their webpages or send electronic gifts to show empathy. Hence, they receive compassion when they are sad and encouragement when they are frustrated. Third, different stages of life such as entering university or college, moving to anew residence, graduating, and entering the professional workforce interrupt people's relationship with one another (Cumming et al., 2006). SNS allow people to maintain relationships with their previous social networks, while still being open to new experiences in their current geographical context (Steinfield et al., 2008).
Encouragement and acceptance, via messages and other facilities provided in SNS, are received from close friends, or newly made acquaintances can help a person to fit in with a new environment (Burke and Cast, 2002). Furthermore, Shaw and Gant (2002)found that perceived loneliness and depression decrease, and social relationship support increases following engagement in online chat sessions. It may also happen in SNS such as Facebook The impact of interactions with weak acquaintances would be higher on social relationship maintenance than interactions with close friends. This happens because close friends would be more intimate and possess a closer relationship. The kind of background knowledge and history with a person may put close friends in a more stable position that social networking activities are not likely to significantly interrupt. However, SNS would be an effective platform to maintain the relationship with weak acquaintances whom one does not know well and rarely meet.
H3c: Interactionswithweak acquaintances creates a stronger impact on social relationship maintenance compared with close friends.
In addition to social capital maintenance, the second major reason of participating SNS is information seeking and sharing, which fulfill the motive of curiosity (Morgan and King, 1970), information need (Wilson, 1981) and decision support. Nowadays, people share their experience and interest with others in SNS. The informationseeking in SNS is also very easy.
With a few simple clicks, a person can post questions regarding the information they are seeking for to all of his/her friends in SNS. Past studies on weak ties have demonstrated that friends are not only helpful for job hunting (Lin, 1988), they are also useful for providing technical advice (Constant et al., 1996). Nevertheless, only public information is shared among weak acquaintances (Granovetter, 1973 H4a: Interactionswith weak acquaintances in SNS enhances information sharing.
H4b: Interactionswith close friends in SNS enhances information sharing.
Comparing the information being shared among close friends and weak acquaintances, close friends may share more sensitive information via communication means that are more private, whereas weak acquaintances would share more on public information via public channels in SNS (Granovetter, 1973). Thus, the interactions with weak acquaintances via SNS may have greater impact on information sharing than that with close friends, given that public information would most likely be shared in SNS. From the above arguments, the following hypothesis is predicted.
H4c: Interactionswithweak acquaintances creates stronger impact compared with close friends on information sharing.
Life satisfaction stems from the judgmental process by an individual (Diener et al., 1985);it is an overall assessment of one's quality of life (Shin & Johnson, 1978: p.478). In past studies (e.g., Diener et al., 1985;Diener&Diener, 1995;Neugarten et al., 1961;Pempek et al., 2009), life satisfaction has served as an index for happiness. In terms of social networking activities, Howard (2008) suggested that people who participate in social network sites are happier than those who do not. Hawn (2009), in her study of social networking in healthcare, also stated that social media such as Facebook would lead to the happiness of patients. Similarly, Ellison et al. (2007) also found that students with low level of life satisfaction would benefit more from the usage of Facebook for bridging social capital. Hence, we suspect their life satisfaction would be raised after using Facebook for a lengthy period. Here, we attempt to explore the mechanism behind the enhancement of life satisfaction of a person while engaging in SNS activities. This is based on Maslow's (1970) need hierarchy theory, and self-determination theory (Dier and Ryan, 1985) which treat life satisfaction as a function of need satisfaction. The following elaborates on the mechanism why establishing self-esteem, maintaining social relationship and sharing information would lead to life satisfaction enhancement.
In the literature, self-esteem and life satisfaction are correlated (Diener&Diener, 1995;Kwan et al., 1997;Valkenburg et al., 2006). According to Maslow (1987), fulfillment of esteem needs to induce positive feelings regarding one's self: feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability, adequacy and competence. This, in turn, generates a profound happiness and richness in one's inner life. Given that life satisfaction is a subjective judgment of one's life, positive self-evaluationsare clearly important to one's feelings of life satisfaction.
Therefore, we propose that the following hypothesis. H5: Self-esteem enhancement in SNS has positive impact on life satisfaction enhancement.
According to Barnes et al.(1954), House (1981) and Li (2011), social relationships promote happiness, or help people cope with stressful events. Lawrence and Nohria(2002) Ellison et al. (2007) mentioned that people who stay longer with a social network benefit from sourcing information. When a person has access to various information sources, they are more able to cope with difficulties, have more opportunities, and gain more benefits (Ellison et al., , p. 1163. Lawrence and Nohria (2002) explained that the drive-to-explore happens when people observe something interesting. After they have acquired information from their social network, the drive-to-explore would be satisfied.
Consequently, information obtained from SNS would enrich the life satisfaction of a person.
Therefore the following hypothesis is proposed.
H7: Information sharing in SNS has positive impact on life satisfaction.

Methodology
To test the research framework, we developed a questionnaire to measure the constructs.
Each construct consisted of statements against which respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement (ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree on a 7-point Likert scale). The items for measuring the constructs were derived from previous studies. The Scale of Life Satisfaction wasadapted from the Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985). Accordingly, items such as "I feel happier after using Facebook" were adjusted slightly to fit into the context of SNS. Items for self-esteem enhancement, such as "After using Facebook, I feel more positive towards myself," were adapted from Burke and Cast (2002). On the items related to social relationship maintenance, we referred to the scale of Socially Supportive Behaviors (Barreara et al., 1981) and adopted items such as "Facebook helps me feel more socially acceptable." For the information-sharing construct on actual Facebook usage, we used behavioral items such as "I use Facebook for information searching" extracted from Rafaeli and Raban (2005).
The constructs relating to interactions with weak acquaintances and close friends were modified from Ellison et al. (2007). The interactions with close friend construct consisted of Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies Volume: 5 -Issue: 2 April -2015 items such as "I use Facebook for interacting with people whom I know well and see frequently," whereas items such "I use Facebook for interacting with people whom I do not know well and do not see regularly," were used for measuring the construct interacting with weak acquaintance. With reference to Livingstone (2008), and Joinson (2008), most people like to share their experience or information by updating his/her webpage or posting photos on social networking sites. Based on these usual practices, we included items such as "When using Facebook, I spend much time updating my own page" to measure the updating webpage construct. Demographic data such as age, gender, and level of education were collected at the end of the questionnaire. The social networking site Facebook was surveyed in Hong Kong, whereas Xiaonei was examined in the Mainland China version.
A professional translator fluent in both Chinese and English was hired to translate the Chinese version of the survey to English. After the translation process, we verified both the English and Chinese versions to ensure they were of identical meaning before sending them out. The Chinese version was also back-translated to English to ensure both versions have identical meaning. The essential items in the survey are shown in Table 1. In this study, university students are sampled. They are the frequent participants on the three essential SNS activities (updating a webpage, interactions with close friends and with weak acquaintances). Compared with those working classes, studying the life satisfaction of university students is less complicated as the life goals of students would be focusing on learning and social networking. Their life satisfaction will be more related to self-esteem establishment via self-esteem enhancement, relatedness via relationship maintenance and reaching information via sharing information. Besides self-esteem, relatedness, and reaching information, life satisfaction of workers would be related to job satisfaction, financial needs, and work-life balance (Erdogan, et al. 2012). Moreover, university students were chosen for our survey because they are the pioneer users of SNS and they are the digital natives of the as the samples are students studying in universities. In particular, the students in Hong Kong Polytechnic University were studying for their master's degree; thus, their ages ranged from 31 to 40. This reflects the normal student profile in Hong Kong universities where people are studying their master's degree after some years of working experience. Moreover, the student sample from Wuhan universities also reflects the norms of university students in Wuhan. Convergent validity of the measurement scales was evaluated using the two criteria suggested by Fornell and Larcker(1981) and Nunnally(1978): (1) Table 3. All items exhibited a loading value higher than 0.7 on their respective constructs. Thus, acceptable item convergence on the intended constructs was achieved. The AVEs of the constructs, as shown in Table 4, were all greater than the variances due to measurement errors. Hence, both conditions for convergent validity were amply fulfilled.   The correlation matrix of the data set is shown in Table 4. This enables us to examine all potentially overlapping constructs. If the items comprising a construct do not overlap markedly with other constructs (i.e., the AVE of a construct is larger than its squared intercorrelations with other constructs), then discriminant validity of the construct is assured (1981). Table 4 shows that the diagonal elements (reporting the square root of the variance shared between a construct and its measures) are all higher than the correlations between target constructs without exceptions, suggesting discriminant validity of all the constructs in this study.
Reliability refers to the extent to which a construct is free from errors and yields consistent results. As shown in We conducted the Harmon one-factor analysis suggested by Podsakoff and Organ (1986) to check the existence of common method bias. For both surveys, a factor analysis combining every variable in the research framework did not detect a single factor explaining the majority of covariance. Furthermore, results of the structural models showed different degrees of significance for path coefficients. The above evidence collectively suggests that common method bias is not a serious concern in this study.
Judging from the standard deviations of all the items, the sampled data have enough variations to represent the population, which include students who have experience using SNS. This is especially important; despite our filtering out of students unfamiliar with SNS, the resulting sample still contained adequate variations. The means of the items, as shown in Table 5, suggest that the respondents were active on webpage updates and visiting webpages of weak acquaintances and close friends. They were also positive on social relationship maintenance via SNS. In particular, for Wuhan students, they were also positive toward SNS as an information-sharing channel. As a whole, there were signs of positive enhancement on their life satisfactions after using SNS.
After conducting the measurement invariance, as described by Doll et al.(1998) and Steenkamp and Baumgartner (1998) This is along with people in Hong Kong who are more individualistic than Wuhan.Overall, the enhancement in life satisfaction after using SNS is statistically at a higher level for university students in Wuhan than those in Hong Kong.  (4) 3.83(1.10) 4.28(1.23) -0.45 *** a. The number in parentheses indicates the resulting number of items in the scale b. All the differences are significant with p-value < 0.001 Next, we proceeded to evaluate independently the structural model fit for each group. Table 6 shows the indices of both structural models complying with the combinational rule on desired levels on various fitness from Hu and Bentler (1999), providing evidence of a good model fit. Figure 2 illustrates the structural models for data from Hong Kong and Wuhan. H4a, suggesting that interactions with close friends have an impact on information sharing, is not supported.

Discussion
Our findings show hypothesis H1 is supported in both samples. This validates that updating one's webpage does establish one's self-esteem. This is because SNS users usually post their good aspects including those selected photos in their webpages. This is a kind of self-verification process. Eventually these good aspects will generate a good image of a person and be more attractive among their close friends as well as their weak acquaintances.
This will then help the person to establish his/her self-esteem.
With respect to H2a and H2b, interactions with close friends and weak acquaintances have impacts on establishing one's self-esteem. This is because through social interactions, one would be recognized within the social group. Thus the relatedsocial identity will raise one's self-esteem.Our findings from H3a and H3b show that SNS provide a suitable environment for university students to maintain relationships with close friends and weak acquaintances.As indicated in our findings of the Wuhan sample on hypothesis H3c, the impact of interactions with weak acquaintances have a greater effect on social relationship maintenance when compared with the interactions with close friends. In this regard, our findings are somehow in line with current literature that SNS usage in China is more toward a weak tie social space (Fu and Zhang, 2011).
Interactionswith close friends who know one another well and meet one another more frequently is primarily face-to-face or through personal communication channels, such as email, mobile phones, or Whatapps. Thus, close friends may not prefer to use SNS for information sharing as they have so many other choices, which are more convenient, personal and private.In usual, SNS require logging on to a website with Internet connection, and the issues discussed in SNS are almost public. Hence, SNS would be a preferable platform for information sharing among weak acquaintances whom do not know one another well and rarely meet one another. It is reasonable that those weak acquaintances may not know each other's email and mobile phone number, and the information being shared is less sensitive.
This would explain why H4b is supported while H4a is not supported. As a consequence, the impacts of interactions with weak acquaintances are also higher on information sharing as compared with interactions with close friends as validated in H4c.
Comparing the two samples, the impacts of interactions of weak acquaintances on information sharing are higher in university students of Wuhan than those in Hong Kong. It would be due to the fact that university students in China come from different provinces/counties (Brown & Park, 2002). They would likely have different exposures and backgrounds, and sharing information among themselves would be more interesting than those people coming from similar backgrounds within a local geography, such as Hong Kong.
Additionally, IDD calls in China are expensive, thereby attracting people to use free Internet services such as QQ or SNS to maintain relationships with one another.
Concerning the ultimate impact on life satisfaction, our findings on hypotheses H5, H6 and H7 show that enhancement on self-esteem, relationship maintenance and information sharing are all significant. Nevertheless, information sharing has less impact on life satisfaction enhancement for Hong Kong students than that of Wuhan students. This reflects that people in Hong Kong share their information via different means in a more convenient way (Townsend, 2001).

Conclusion
As with all empirical research, this investigation has several limitations. A notable weakness lies in the cross-sectional research design, where all measurement items were collected at the same point in time. Given that the investigated constructs are not supposed to remain unchanged over time, this research method may not fully capture the influence of SNS usage along the time. This constraint limits the extent to which causality can be inferred.
This study only offers insight on comparing the impact of SNS usage without reference to non-users. Furthermore, given the intricacy of student activities on SNS, factors such as students' interest and usage pattern in SNS may all potentially affect the findings. Whereas the present study emphasizes the key constructs that would cause life satisfaction of students after engaging SNS, future research should investigate the impact of SNS usage on life satisfactions of the working class.
Furthermore, the relationship between interactions with friends and self-esteem may be mutual rather than one-directional. It is because people with high self-esteem may tend to update his/her webpage more so as to share their interest and recent activities. Nevertheless, our model limits to the impact of SNS usage on self-esteem but not the reverse direction.
Finally, we are more reserved about our findings on university students in Hong Kong and Wuhan in China where our surveys were conducted. Though we argue that university students in Hong Kong and Wuhan are representative of most educated users of SNS in Hong Kong and China, the generalizability of the results would still be limited to university students but not SNS users in general.
This study empirically supports the theoretical model of life satisfaction enhancement upon using SNS. Individuals who exert time and effort updating their Facebook/Xiaonei gain more self-esteem. Interactions with close friends are significantly related to social relationship maintenance, but not to information sharing. Furthermore, interactions with weak acquaintances have greater effects on social relationship maintenance and information sharing than the impacts from interactions with close friends. These impacts would enhance one's life satisfaction.