Do online social interactions cultivate social capital? Evidence from a longitudinal study

Abstract

It is widely documented that social capital can benefit individual and social development. However, research on the roles of internet technologies in cultivating social capital has not arrived at a consensus. This article aims to understand the effects of online social interactions (OSIs) on generalized trust and prosocial civic engagement, two essential forms of social capital, with a longitudinal study and structural equation model. Fixed-effect model estimations consistently show that OSIs can effectively increase levels of generalized trust in China. Also, trust in parents is used as an alternative dependent variable to provide a comparative analysis. The mechanisms of these two sources of trust are different, and insignificant effects of OSIs on trust in parents are found to implicitly support the causal link between OSIs and trust in strangers. In this study, we implemented a series of robustness checks, for example, examinations using only the netizens as a sample and cross-sectional methods. Furthermore, we explored the relationship between OSIs and prosocial civic engagement (charitable donation), a behavior form of social capital. The SEM results suggested that charitable behaviors were positively affected by OSIs and generalized trust played a positive mediating role. Additionally, significant positive direct and indirect effects through the generalized trust in OSIs were found on prosocial behaviors.