Social capital and success in the adult film industry

In economics, capital can be simply defined as 'things that can be used to produce other things'. Taking a broad interpretation of 'things' allows us to recognise intangible forms of capital, such as human capital (our education, knowledge, and experience) and social capital (our connections with others, trust, and shared understandings). These intangible forms of capital make people more productive (which is what makes them capital), but intangible forms of capital are more difficult to measure than physical or financial forms of capital.

How much more productive does social capital make people? That is a difficult question to answer, in most part because of the difficulty of measuring social capital. However, I recently ran across an interesting attempt to measure the gains from social capital in the adult film industry, described in this article by Jochen Lüdering (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen), published in the journal Applied Economics in 2018 (ungated earlier version here).

Lüdering collated data on performers in the adult film industry, based on the Internet Adult Film Database, and covering the period from 1970 to 2013. He then captured the 'network structure' of the industry, based on each performer (as a 'node') and all of the other performers that they appeared in at least one film with (the connections between nodes are referred to as 'undirected links'). The network structure can be summarised in various ways in order to try to measure social capital. Lüdering uses 'Eigenvector centrality', which is a measure of how much 'influence' a node (in this case, an adult film performer) has on the rest of the network, based on how well-connected they are, and how well-connected their connections are.

In terms of the 'success' (as Lüdering refers to it) of each performer, Lüdering uses the length of time each performer remained in the industry. He justifies this as:

...this article relies on survival (time active) in the industry as a measure of economic success for individual performers and argues that one person stays in the industry as long as (economic) benefits exceed costs. In this argument, ‘costs’ should be defined in very broad terms and should include all kinds of adverse effects for the person.

The argument is that more 'successful' performers will receive greater benefits from their performances, and therefore remain in the industry for longer. There are good arguments why that might not be the case though, if performers have a 'target' for lifetime earnings and stop performing when they reach their target (there is evidence that taxi drivers labour supply exhibits such income targeting, for example, but this evidence is contested). Putting aside that concern, in a survival analysis Lüdering finds that:

Ones eigenvector centrality is both significant and negative; this implies that a central actor in the network has a lower probability to experience an event (i.e. drop out of the industry) in the following period. Being disconnected from the network increases the risk to experience an event...

For a person twice as central as the median performer, the relative hazard is reduced by about one-third. 

In other words, social capital (as proxied by connectedness or influence within the network of adult film performers) is correlated with the length of time an adult film performer remains in the industry. More-connected performers remain in the industry for longer, which Lüdering suggests means that more-connected performers are more successful. I'm not sure I necessarily agree (as per my critique on the measure of success above). The length of time a performer remains in the industry doesn't necessarily tell us about the value they generate, or their productivity. We would need some additional data (which Lüdering acknowledges), and a follow-up study, for that. However, it is clear how important social capital is in this context.

The persistent effects of the Spanish Inquisition

Continuing the economic history theme from the yesterday's post, this new article by Mauricio Drelichman (University of British Columbia), Jordi Vidal-Robert (University of Sydney), and Hans-Joachim Voth (University of Zurich), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (ungated earlier version here) looks at the long-run consequences of the Spanish Inquisition. As they explain:

...we investigate the long-run impact of religious persecution on economic performance, education, and trust. The Spanish Inquisition is among the most iconic examples of a state-sponsored apparatus enforcing religious homogeneity... Histories of Spain’s decline and fall as an economic power frequently emphasize the role of the Inquisition... and sociological studies have argued for a “persistence of the inquisitorial mind” in modern-day Spanish thought...

Obviously, given the time period involved (the Spanish Inquisition ran from 1478 to 1834), this relates to the Little Divergence, as discussed in yesterday's post (and this earlier post). Drelichman et al. have data on the number of people persecuted in the Inquisition for many Spanish municipalities (based on around 67,000 records of Inquisition trials), and relate that to modern-day differences in incomes (measured using nightlight intensity), and survey-based measured of religiosity (measured by frequency of church attendance), education (proportion of the population with a high school diploma) and generalised trust. In terms of income, they find that:

Municipalities with no recorded inquisitorial activity as well those in the lowest tercile of persecution have the highest GDP per capita today. Those affected but in the middle tercile already have markedly lower income. Where the Inquisition struck with highest intensity (top tercile), the level of economic activity in Spain today is sharply lower. Magnitudes are large: In places with no persecution, median GDP per capita was 19,450€; where the Inquisition was active in more than 3 y out of 4, it is below 18,000€... Our estimates imply that had Spain not suffered from the Inquisition, its annual national production today would be 4.1% higher...

In terms of their other outcome measures, they find that:

A one-SD increase in inquisition intensity is associated with an increase of between 1.3% and 3.7% in religious service attendance...

We find a consistently negative relationship between persecution and educational attainment... going from no exposure to the Inquisition to half of all years being affected by persecutions would reduce the share of the population receiving higher education today by 2.7 percentage points, relative to a mean of 47.5 percentage points—a 5.6% relative reduction...

A one-SD increase in inquisitorial intensity reduces average municipality-level trust by 0.03 to 0.05 SDs.

All of the effects are statistically significant. Of course, it would be reasonable to worry that the Inquisition targeted its activities on areas that differed in relevant ways, such as areas that were more religious, or areas that were poorer. However, Drelichman et al. find the opposite:

To address the possibility that the Inquisition might have favored locales with high levels of pre-existing religiosity, we collect data on pre-Inquisition religious figures from the Spanish Biographical Dictionary... We then estimate the local density of famous people with strong links to the church and use it to examine whether inquisitorial intensity was systematically higher in places that were more religious pre- 1480. Our data suggests the opposite—places with greater inquisitorial intensity had a lower density of famous religious individuals...

A second concern is that the Inquisition could have been attracted to poorer areas. Standard histories of the Inquisition suggest this is unlikely. The Inquisition was self-financing. It had to confiscate property and impose fines to pay for its expenses and the salaries of inquisitors. While its mission was to persecute heresy, it had strong incentives to look for it in richer places...

In relation to the question of whether targeted areas were poorer, they use the location of hospitals, which were predominantly located in rural areas and:

Largely geared to care for the poor and for out-of-towners who fell ill and had no other place to stay, hospitals were credited with reducing the number of destitute people living and dying on the streets...

So, hospitals are indicative of areas that were, in general, wealthier and with higher social capital. They find that:

Inquisitorial intensity was five times higher in places with hospitals, and the difference is highly significant...

They move on to repeat many of their analyses using coarsened exact matching (which I discussed in this recent post), and find very similar results. Again, as with much of the literature in economic history, the results do not demonstrate causality, but we are getting closer to understanding the Little Divergence. And the results of this paper might not be limited to Spain. As Drelichman et al. conclude:

...the Inquisition also operated in Southern Italy and throughout Spanish America. Inquisitorial practices were also instituted throughout the Portuguese Empire and the Papal States. All of these areas today show relatively low education, lower incomes, and less generalized trust.

[HT: Marginal Revolution]

Read more:

• Economic institutions and the 'Little Divergence'
• Portugal, gold, and the resource curse in the Little Divergence

The impact of epidemics on generalised trust

A few weeks ago, the Waikato Economics Discussion Group looked at this article by Arnstein Aasve, Guido Alfani, Francesco Gandolfi (all Bocconi University), and Marco Le Moglie (Catholic University of the Sacred Hearth), published in the journal Health Economics (ungated earlier version here). Aasve looked at a particularly timely topic - the impact of the Spanish Flu (1918-1919) on generalised trust.

This is a difficult topic to investigate, because there are no measures of generalised trust available for the 1918-1919 period (or immediately before and after, which is what you'd really want). Instead, Aasve et al. use data from the U.S. General Social Survey from 1978-2018 to infer measures of social trust for earlier generations. Specifically:

Survey respondents were also asked about their country of ethnic origin and a series of questions regarding their migration history: whether they were born in the United States or not, whether their mother and father were born in the United States and the number of grandparents born outside the country. Using this information, we group respondents on the basis of their country of ethnic origin and categorize them in three waves of immigration: second-generation Americans (i.e., people born in the United States with at least one parent and all the grandparents born abroad), third‐generation Americans (i.e., people with at least two immigrant grandparents and both parents born in the United States) and fourth‐generation Americans (i.e., people with more than two grandparents born in the United States and both parents born in the United States). We exploit different waves of immigration to measure the intergenerational path of social capital transmission by people migrated before and after the spread of the Spanish flu (i.e., 1918)...

It's quite an ingenious method, although it relies on a fairly strong assumption of intergenerational transmission of social trust. They have measures of trust from the GSS for 18 origin countries (Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). Comparing levels of trust between countries at different levels of flu mortality, they find:

...a negative and significant effect of the Spanish Flu on trust. An increase in influenza mortality of one death per thousand resulted in a 1.4 percentage points decrease in trust.

Since mortality rates ranged between about 2 deaths per thousand and 20 deaths per thousand, moving from the bottom to the top of the distribution would decrease trust by around 25 percentage points, which is quite meaningful. Aasve et al. then go on to investigate potential mechanisms underlying their results:

A narrower resonance of the war within neutral countries, together with the specific lack of war censorship on media, might have led their respective citizens to internalize the extent and severity of the pandemic, and thus altered their social interactions accordingly... Consistently with this hypothesis, we do find a stronger reduction in social trust for the descendants of people migrating from countries heavily hit by the epidemic and that remained neutral during the war.

Of relevance to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, they conclude that:

...if, during the Spanish Flu, the failure of government institutions and national health care services to contain the crisis led civil societies to experience a serious breakdown due to the climate of generalized suspicion (a situation further exacerbated by mistakes in communication, also due to war censorship) and this increased the persistent damage to social capital, then governments facing COVID‐19 today might have an additional reason to opt for strong policies of pandemic containment. While these are undoubtedly costly in the short run, it might be that they will contribute to minimize some economic costs to be paid in the long run.

However, as noted in the EDG group meeting where we discussed this paper, you could also interpret the results as suggesting that countries that did not heavily censor their media during the Spanish Flu pandemic suffered greater losses in generalised trust. Therefore censoring the media has a protective effect and governments that wanted to maintain high levels of trust should censor their media. Before we conclude that Russia or China has a better approach to maintaining the generalised trust of their population though, I think we need to see whether these results replicate for the current crisis.

How will the coronavirus pandemic affect trust in science, and in scientists?

In a new and very interesting article published in the Journal of Public Economics (ungated earlier version here), Barry Eichengreen (University of California, Berkeley), Cevat Giray Aksoy (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), and Orkun Saka (University of Sussex) looked at the relationship between exposure to past epidemics and trust in science and in scientists. They use data from the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor, which included several questions about how much people trust government and corporate scientists, and how much they trust science in general. They also measure each survey participant's exposure to past epidemics while they were aged 18-25 (what is termed the 'impressionable years'), using the EM-DAT disaster database (and the article itself has an exhaustive table of all of the epidemics they included in the appendix), and measuring exposure as the number of people in the country as a share of population in each year.

They find that:

...such exposure is negatively associated with trust in scientists and, specifically, with views of their integrity and trustworthiness. Specifically, an individual with the highest exposure to an epidemic (relative to zero exposure) is 11 percentage points less likely to have trust in the scientist (the respective average of this variable in our sample is 76%).

Interestingly, they also find that:

The effect we find is not a general decline in trust in science, but only in scientists.

It also isn't a decline in trust of elites, because there is no similar negative relationship with trust in doctors and nurses, or traditional healers. So, it really is just a loss of trust in scientists. Eichengreen et al. posit that this arises because:

Members of the public who are not familiar with the scientific process may interpret the conflicting views of scientists and criticism of some studies by the authors of others as signs of bias or dishonesty. This paper cannot analyze the first argument, due to lack of data on scientific communication during past epidemics. But we provide suggestive evidence for the second, showing that individuals with little scientific training drive the negative relationship between past epidemic exposure and trust in scientists.

Do the results matter though? It turns out that they might be quite consequential:

...we show that past epidemic exposure negatively shapes respondents’ long-term attitudes towards vaccination and reduces the likelihood that their children are vaccinated against childhood diseases.

The danger here is that we are in a world-changing pandemic right now. The generation in their 'impressionable years' right now are not only being exposed to a greater risk of harm, but they are also far more exposed to the scientific debate than ever before, due to pervasive social media. If the Eichengreen et al. paper results can be extrapolated, then this generation is going to have an incredibly negative view of scientists (but not of science more generally). The way that scientific debate has been played out over Twitter has not done any scientists any favours. It is difficult to see how this can be mitigated. At the very least, as Eichengreen et al. conclude:

Addressing concerns about corporate agendas, personal bias and disagreement in scientific communication is even more important in this light. Our results suggest that it is especially important to tailor any such response to the concerns expressed by members of the generation (‘‘Generation Z”) currently in their impressionable years.

The persistent impact of autocratic rule on social capital

Social capital is the capital that is embodied in inter-personal relationships. It encompasses networks, alliances, shared norms and values, reciprocity, and trust. The level and forms of social capital are determined by people's attitudes and beliefs. So, if political or economic institutions alter those attitudes or beliefs, then the level or form of social capital might also be altered.

That is the thesis underlying this working paper by Melanie Xue (Northwestern University) and Mark Koyama (George Mason University), which looks at the impact of autocratic rule in Qing dynasty China on subsequent measures of social capital. Specifically, Xue and Koyama look at the impact of literary inquisitions. As they explain:

Following the Manchu occupation of China in 1644, and the establishment of the Qing dynasty, imperial China saw a sharp increase in political repression and an entrenchment of autocratic rule. Intellectuals, the most influential figures in local society, saw new restrictions imposed on them. One watershed event was the intensification and routinization of literary inquisitions - investigations which targeted the speech and writings of intellectuals.

Essentially, Xue and Koyama compare prefectures that had had at least one literary inquisition (the 'treatment' group in this quasi-experimental research) with prefectures that had not (or had not yet) had any literary inquisitions (the 'control' group). They look at both historical measures of social capital (e.g. the number of local charities) and more modern measures (e.g. generalised trust).

This is a very detailed paper. Their first step is to demonstrate that political repression through the literary inquisitions affected attitudes and beliefs. Looking at the number of 'reputable individuals', which is based on a compendium that listed people who were:

...well known for reasons that included prominence in science and technology, medicine and healthcare, education, classical and literary scholarship, history, art, or poetry.

Comparing matched treatment and control prefectures over the period 1640-1819, they found that:

...literary inquisitions led to fewer reputable individuals and that this decline was more pronounced among individuals who came of age in the decade of a literary inquisition... This concurs with historical accounts that individuals withdrew from public life and sought to evade attention in order to keep a low profile...

Next, they looked at the contemporaneous impact on social capital. Charities are a good measure of social capital in this context because:

...the level of charity provision reflects the degree to which individuals are willing to volunteer time and resources to help other members of society...

They found that:

...after a prefecture was first exposed to a literary inquisition case, the number of local charities in that prefecture fell by an average of 38% in the following decades, relative to prefectures that never had a literary inquisition, or prefectures that had not yet experienced a literary inquisition. Mapping out the full dynamic response of charity formation, we characterize the evolution of social capital after exposure to literary inquisitions, and show that the “charity gap” between prefectures which had and which had not been affected, kept widening for the next four decades before stabilizing. This effect did not go away towards the end of the charity data series in the early 20th century.

So, the impact of political repression on social capital was relatively large. It also endured for some time. Looking at data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), they found that:

...Qing persecutions are associated with lower generalized trust. This effect is economically significant: in our main specification, political repression is associated with a decline of 0.179 in trust, which is 16.7% of its standard deviation...

In contrast, there is no effect on trust in family members, so the impact of political repression is on trust outside of the family. Xue and Koyama also demonstrate negative effects on literacy levels among those educated in the early 20th Century, when education was decentralised and so relied more on social capital for its delivery. They also show that those effects don't depend on other political and social events such as the Taiping Rebellion, the exodus to Taiwan in 1949, and the Cultural Revolution (the latter two events might affect the earlier results because they change which people would be observed in the CGSS sample). They also provide evidence using instrumental variables analysis that their results are causal - the literary inquisitions in Qing China caused the differences in literacy rates in 20th Century China.

Finally, they also show impacts on modern political attitudes and behaviour:

Starting with attitudinal questions, we find that individuals in prefectures with a legacy of literary inquisitions are less likely to say that people like themselves can have an impact on decisions made by government... and less likely to believe that their suggestions to the government will be adopted... reflecting greater political apathy in affected prefectures... Next, we examine participatory behavior... Our main findings are that survey respondents from affected prefectures are less likely either to volunteer on local committees... or to make suggestions to local committees...

We find that individuals in prefectures with a legacy of literary inquisitions are less likely to agree with the following statements: “Western-style multi-party systems are not suitable for China”... “Free speech is ‘Western’ and will only lead to chaos”... and “Modern China needs to be guided by wisdom of Confucius”... For other questions in the survey, such as those regarding social issues, there is no systematic difference in individual responses between prefectures with a legacy of literary inquisitions and those with no such past.

There is a lot to digest in this paper. The authors conclude that:

Both the results from the historical panel and those from post-Qing cross sections suggest that political repression permanently reduced social capital. The effect of literary inquisitions on social capital has survived, even after local institutions were transformed by the modern socialist state...

We establish social capital as a missing link to understanding the dynamics of state-society relations. Autocracies can provide order and public goods when social capital is low. For this reason, autocracy may appeal to individuals in societies with low social capital. Hence, by reducing social capital, autocratic rule can introduce a self-reinforcing cycle that favors its survival and persistence.

This self-reinforcing cycle has implications for many modern societies that have tried unsuccessfully to adopt more democratic norms. It demonstrates the persistence of autocratic rule, and the norms and attitudes that sustain it.

Social capital and the spread of coronavirus in Europe

Like many researchers, I've been closely following the emerging research on the coronavirus pandemic, and looking to contribute to it. With some colleagues, I've been looking at how social capital might be related to the success (or otherwise) of lockdown policies, and the effect on coronavirus infections and deaths. The idea was intuitive - reducing infection rates essentially requires that people act in the best interests of society, so (holding other relevant factors constant) countries or regions with higher social capital should be suffering less, with fewer infections and coronavirus-related deaths.

Unfortunately, our data analysis to date hasn't been showing anything of interest, which we have put down to measurement error in the data. However, this new working paper by Alina Kristin Bartscher (University of Bonn) and co-authors offers a sensible explanation for our null results:

From a theoretical perspective, social capital, the spread of Covid-19 and containment policies interact in various ways. First, high-social-capital areas are known to be more vibrant and better connected, economically and socially... Hence, we expect the virus to spread more quickly in those areas in the beginning of the pandemic, when information about the virus and its severity were incomplete. Second, as soon as the importance of behavioral containment norms becomes more salient, we expect the relationship to change... we expect that informal rules of containment are more likely to be (voluntarily) adopted in areas with high social capital, leading to a relative decrease in infections.

In our analysis, we had adopted a cross-sectional approach to try to overcome some of the measurement issues with the high-frequency data. However, in adopting that approach we were conflating the early period, when the relationship between social capital and infections is expected to be positive, with the later period, when the relationship is expect to be negative. It should be no surprise then, that we were finding null results!

Anyway, the Bartscher et al. paper uses data for seven European countries (Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK), and uses electoral turnout in the European elections (or local elections for Switzerland) as a measure of social capital. They also use a number of different measures (both social capital, and outcome measures) for Italy. They found that:

First, the number of Covid-19 cases is initially higher in high-social-capital areas. Second, as information on the virus spreads, high-social- capital areas start to show a slower increase in Covid-19 cases in all seven countries. Third, high-social-capital areas also exhibit a slower growth in excess deaths in Italy. Fourth, individual mobility is reduced more strongly before the lockdown in Italian high-social-capital areas. Fifth, we provide suggestive evidence that the role of social capital is reduced when national lockdowns are enforced, as the differences in mobility between high- and low-social-capital areas vanish after the national lockdown is enacted.

More specifically, the found that high-social capital regions have between 12 percent and 32 percent fewer cumulative coronavirus cases. When they look at Italy in more detail, they found that one standard deviation higher social capital (electoral turnout) is associated with 7 percent lower excess mortality, and a 15 percent reduction is mobility. The latter result demonstrates the likely mechanism through which social capital leads to fewer deaths - people in areas with more social capital adhere more closely to the lockdown rules that people in areas with less social capital.

Overall, Bartscher et al. conclude that:

...the consistent pattern obtained from independent analyses of seven countries as strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis that social capital plays an important role in slowing down the spread of the virus.

This is probably not the last word on this line or research. Bartscher et al.'s approach of simply comparing regions above and below the median level of social capital within the country is rather crude, even though the results are as expected. It would be interesting to see whether the results hold when social capital is treated as a continuous measure rather than simply categorising high/low social capital areas. It would also be interesting to see if similar results are obtained for counties in the U.S. No doubt we will see analysis of U.S. counties sometime in the future.

Online social networks, social capital, and wellbeing

In economics, capital is essentially defined as a collection of resources that an individual uses to produce goods or services (even if those goods or services are not traded in markets). Some types of capital are obvious, such as machinery or tools (physical capital), or financial wealth (financial capital). Others are a little less obvious, like the stock of human capital (our knowledge, training, and experience, etc.) and natural capital (land, air, water, biodiversity, etc.). Then there is social capital - the social relationships that we have with other people. Social capital is the most difficult to measure (even more difficult than natural capital), but typically we measure it in terms of the number of relationships, and the quality of those relationships, and in terms of quality, we often use the degree of social trust as one measure.

All of that is a long-winded way of talking about the value of online social networks (which is a topic I have discussed before - see the links at the end of this post). In theory, social networks could increase social capital, because they allow us to increase the number of social relationships. However, social networks could also decrease social capital if, in spite of a larger number of relationships, the quality of those relationships is lower. If a social network has a particularly bad culture, the quality might even be negative (if belonging to the network makes us worse off, holding the number of relationships constant).

How can we understand whether social networks have a net benefit (the increase in relationships outweighs any decrease in their quality) or a net cost (the decrease in quality outweighs the increase in relationships)? One way is to look at subjective wellbeing (or life satisfaction, or happiness), and that's what a lot of studies have done (see the links at the end of the post for a few examples). However, fewer studies have also looked at social capital.

One notable exception is this 2017 article by Fabio Sabatini (Sapienza University of Rome) and Francesco Sarracino (STATEC, Luxembourg), published in the journal Kyklos (appears to be open access, but just in case there is an ungated earlier version here). They use data on around 50,000 people from the 2010-2012 waves of the Italian Multipurpose Household Survey. Subjective wellbeing was measured on a 0-10 scale (which is quite common), but online social network use was measured by the yes/no response to the question: "Did you make use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in the last 12 months?". Social capital was measured by the number of interactions with friends (quantity), and the dichotomous response to the question: "Do you think that most people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?" (quality).

The problem with most studies of online social networks is that they can't show that using the social network causes a change in subjective wellbeing, because perhaps happier (or less happy) people are more likely to use the online social network, in which case the causality runs in the wrong direction. Sabatini and Sarracino try to get around this by using instrumental variables analysis - essentially they predict people's social network access by looking at whether the area they lived in had access to high-speed broadband (DSL or fibre) or not in 2008 (i.e. two years before the survey), then see if the predicted social network access is related to subjective wellbeing. There are issues with these instruments, which I will come back to shortly. Sabatini and Sarracinofind that there is:

...a significant and negative correlation between the use of SNS [social networking sites] and subjective well-being which is independent from the controls for social capital.

In their instrumental variables analysis, they find that:

...the proxies of social capital are positively and significantly associated with life satisfaction, while the use of SNS has negative and significant coefficients.

Finally, they use structural equation modelling (SEM) to look at the inter-relationships between online social network use, social capital, and subjective wellbeing. They find that:

The SEM analysis suggests that the significantly negative correlation between SNS use and subjective well-being obtained in OLS estimates is not only the result of a direct negative effect, but it also results from the combination of two indirect channels:

1. the negative correlation between the use of SNS and social trust that negatively affects well-being.

2. the positive correlation between the use of SNS and face-to-face interactions that positively affects well-being.

Taken all together, their results show that online social networks reduce subjective wellbeing, but that is because online social network use is associated with lower quality of social capital (lower trust), even though online social network use is associated with greater number of social relationships.

This is a nice paper, because of the combination of several methods of analysis. However, the results aren't as strong as the authors claim. The instruments (DSL and fibre broadband access) are not good instruments, because high-speed internet is not necessary in order to access social networks, and because high-speed internet is also associated with increases in the use of many other internet tools (online video, for example). However, despite that, the results are at least consistent with our theoretical predictions from the start of this post. Of most interest may be that the use of online social networks was associated with more face-to-face interactions, rather than just more online interactions.

More papers in this research area should take account of social capital though, if we really want to understand how online social networks affect subjective wellbeing.

Read more:

• The latest NZ research on social media and mental health is nothing special
• What happens when you disconnect from Facebook?
• Does the Internet make people happier?
• The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel
• Quitting Facebook might make you happier