Family Communication of University Students on Facebook

Abstract

With the widespread usage of Facebook throughout the world, Facebook has also started to be used in family communication both by adults and young people. Family members and relatives have recently started to take part in this well-known social media platform. Especially, family members and relatives who pursue separate lives in different cities can get together through Facebook and communicate by sharing photos, sending messages or making video calls. Thus, many adults and young people have participated into Facebook to strengthen their family bonds with their relatives and be informed about what their family members are doing in their daily life. The number of studies related with family communication on Facebook is limited in the literature. Especially, the number of studies which focus on how university students maintain family communication with their family members and relatives on Facebook are rather few. Therefore, this research aims to look at how university students keep up family communication on Facebook. For this purpose, a qualitative research was carried out by interviewing 20 students who were enrolled to the Faculty of Communication Sciences at Anadolu University, Turkey.