American students have more followers, and Croatian students use more hashtags.
We live in a digital age, so it’s no wonder that social media and people’s behaviour on them have become subjects of scientific studies.
One such study has recently been conducted by Sheldon Pavica Sheldon, Philipp A. Rauschnabel, Mary Grace Antony, and Sandra Car (from the University of Zagreb), titled “A cross-cultural comparison of Croatian and American social network sites: Exploring cultural differences in motives for Instagram use,” and it will be published in Computers in Human Behavior online journal in October.
Croatia is viewed as a highly collectivistic culture and the US as an individualistic, so the researchers wanted to examine the relationship between motives and behavioural outcomes of use (time spent on Instagram, the frequency of hashtagging, and the number of Instagram followers).
The subjects were asked to rank five levels of Instagram satisfaction: social interaction (seeing what others post about themselves), documentation (remembering special events), diversion (avoiding loneliness, relaxation, or avoiding reality), self-promotion (how to become popular) and creativity (showing your photographing skills), 100 posto reports on August 29, 2017.
There were 293 subjects from Croatia, mostly humanities and social studies students, and 404 American students, 72% of them Caucasian.
Croatian and American students used Instagram more or less with the same frequency. However, American students have an average of 389 followers, twice as much as their Croatian colleagues, but Croatian students used more hashtags.
“Findings reveal that while motivations behind Instagram use do not vary across cultures, different forms of gratification determine how Instagram is used, and how culture moderates these relationships. Croatian students’ Instagram use reflects collectivist tendencies, primarily social interaction. American students’ use of Instagram reflects individualistic trends, namely self-promotion and documentation. In addition, American students’ self-promotion gratifications are significantly related to the amount of time spent on Instagram, although this effect is not apparent among Croatian students. While American students are inclined to use hashtags for documentation, Croatian participants tend to use hashtags for other reasons, including self-promotion, social interaction, and creativity,” research states.
