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De virtuele wereld, niet betreden boven de 50? : een onderzoek naar de verschillen en overeenkomsten in het uiten van het authentieke zelf online en in vivo door middel van toekomstbrieven.

Rouw, Lousan (2015) De virtuele wereld, niet betreden boven de 50? : een onderzoek naar de verschillen en overeenkomsten in het uiten van het authentieke zelf online en in vivo door middel van toekomstbrieven.

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Abstract:The purpose of this study was answering the research question: ‘What are the similarities and differences between the (articulated and self-reported) authentic self on the internet and face to face?’ The online identity becomes increasingly important in a society where internet plays a major role in (our) daily life. The presentation of the authentic self is a part of this online identity, but is a field of research that has not yet been studied properly enough. This study used ‘letters from the future’, which is a standardized method in which the stories that people tell are important. The people who participated in this study wrote a letter about an imaginable future to themselves, thereby showing part of their identity. All the 27 participants have a Dutch nationality, are above 18 years old, and twenty of them are female. The participants were asked to write two letters, one to be posted Facebook and one to be read to the other participants. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of the letters, categories could be made. The occurrence of the categories of personal development, goals, and feelings made a letter more authentic. Thirteen participants only wrote one letter, they did not feel a differences between the conditions. A notable finding was that almost all the people who wrote one letter were the people from the older age group. Fifteen people with two letters showed clear differences between the two conditions. With regard to these differences, it is clear that the reading condition was always more authentic than in the Facebook condition. The letters from the participants with one letter looked the most like the letters from the reading condition. Future studies should focus on an extra condition to decide if a control condition would make any differences. The participants would have to write an extra letter for only themselves, the expectation is that more people want to write two letters.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:77 psychology
Programme:Psychology BSc (56604)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/68488
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