earticle

영어

Self-disclosure is defined as “act of revealing personal information to others” (Archer, 1980, p.183). It plays a key role in development and maintenance of relationships. Since many companies adopt Social Networking Services for their organizational information sharing platform, it is important to identify the process of creating and maintaining social relationship in virtual spaces for successful adoption of SNS. In this research, we identify a selfdisclosure as a driving factor for initiating and maintaining online social relationships. The objectives of this research are in two folds: 1) to explorer the users’ self-disclosures on SNS based on the dimensions of self-disclosure theory (Wheeless and Grotz, 1976) and 2) to discover the difference in each dimension according to strength of relationship. In this research, five dimensions of self-disclosure; intent to disclose, amount of disclosure, the positive-negative nature of disclosure, the honesty-accuracy of disclosure, and general depthcontrol of disclosure are identified based on prior research in personal communication field. This research assumes that the self-disclose strategy adopted by participants in a communication process would be very similar between a face to face communication and a communication through SNS. In addition, this study explores that how the strength of social relationship does affects participants’ self-discloser strategy in SNS. This study will adopt structural survey method and investigate SNS users regarding their self-discloser stagey on their types of social relationship. After collect data, a paired sample t-test will be conducted to compare the difference in each dimension between strong ties and weak ties. The research results could contribute to understanding virtual social relationship in SNS context. Based on the research results, we could suggest various possible strategies that SNS providers and companies can consider as a way enabling users to express themselves truly on SNS.