Understanding the effects of fake profiles in SNS on adolescents behavior: a grounded theory approach

Abstract

This study aims at understanding the impact of fake profiles in SNS on teenagers’ behavior as a Grounded Theory Approach, and as the rapidly growing SNSs today are offering individuals endless possibilities for publicly expressing themselves, communicating with friends, and sharing information with people across the world since SNSs are the most common platforms on the Internet, on which millions of users register to share personal facts with their friends, there are still cases of fake profiling within the online communication system. Therefore, this study focused on investigating the overall aspects of fake profiling among adolescents by focusing on students with different age categories in schools in The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, by attempting to answer the study questions: What are the contexts and prevailing conditions that influence the antecedents of the phenomenon? The second research question is what are the antecedents that contribute toward the occurrence of central phenomenon? Consequently, the third research question is what are the coping strategies resulting from fake profiling activities? Finally, the fourth research question is what are the consequences resulting from the coping strategies taken by the informants? A qualitative research method through interview was conducted for this study using Strauss and Corbin’s GT framework on 78 adolescents and analyzed by using NVivo version 11. Interviews took place over a sevenmonth period, between March 2015 and September 2015. The main findings of this study indicate that informants, especially bullies, accomplished the concepts of “feelings of pleasure” by exploiting online communication to taunt their victims. This has generated negative behaviors that caused positive and negative impacts toward adolescents, which could be regarded as the phenomenon in this study. Another finding shows that informants engaged in fake profiling activities desired to get “a sense of satisfaction” in their lives. This has also led to negative behaviors that caused positive and negative impacts toward adolescents, and that could also be referred to as the phenomenon in this study. The other findings are the significant contribution of social networking toward fake profiling especially Facebook, the positive impacts fake profiling ‘offer’ to adolescents, and two other factors that become antecedents of fake profiling – the supporters and the instigators. In this regard, this study has contributed in clarifying the inter-relationships between themes and subthemes of the fake profiling phenomenon between adolescents in Jordan by highlighting the facts that fake profiling is an unaccepted social phenomenon, and the faster and more effectively we can share ideas about it, the better we can make our targeted aims, the better we can serve our targeted students, the better we can build our targeted committed society. When implementing a successful understanding of fake profiling, then the descriptions of the steps we should expect to take and avoid are compulsory. Other policies and strategies that are influential to the overall growth of the Jordanian adolescents sector are also suggested through the findings on the investigated selected constructs.