Going Private in Public: A study on shift in behavioral trend using Facebook

The growth of social media has open a new dimension of research in the domain of human Psychology. The data generated by virtue of various available social media platforms is enormous, dynamic, unstructured, imprecise and most of the time uncertain. Facebook has emerged as one of the most successful media of social interaction and thus, contributing a lot to understand various aspects of human behavior. In this paper, a specific and crucial aspect of human nature is being explored- “Going Private in Public”. This aspect deals with some unexploited trend of human psychology and the research work presented in this paper is planned such as to investigate the data that eventually helps to understand this aspect to a great extent. A questionnaire to capture some behavioral trends of Facebook user was designed and filled up using both online and offline mode. The questionnaire included sets of non-identifying demographic questions, Facebook Intensity scale, Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adult, Perceived Stress Scale and NEO-PI-R model. Filling of the forms was made voluntarily and anonymously to avoid any biasing. A total of 312 responses were received and analyzed using Independent-Sample t-test, Cronbach's alpha test, Exploratory factor analysis, and MANOVA etc.