Chapter 5 Discussion
5.4 Limitations and further research
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5.4 Limitations and further research
This study is subject to certain limitations. Most of the respondents are university students.
Working Facebook users are under-represented in the sample of this study. This limits the applicability of the results to generalize to the entire population of Taiwan Facebook users.
Future research may focus on the working population of Facebook users. Greater importance on guanxi may be assumed by working forces. Guanxi is important for the exchange of information including trade secrets and competitor information (Warren, Dunfee, & Li, 2004).
The current study is limited to Taiwanese Facebook users. Thus the generalizability of the results to Chinese societies in general may be limited. Further research is required to determine to what extent does guanxi has an impact on the information exchange behavior of Facebook users of other Chinese societies, for example, those in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. The mixed cultural influences in the abovementioned cities or countries may or may not have an impact on the guanxi concept and its role on information exchange. This is a topic worthy of further exploration.
Another limitation of the study is the online self-report survey method for data collection.
The quality of answers falls beyond the control of the researcher. Clarifications and follow up questions were unavailable to further understand the interplay of tie strength, guanxi and information exchange behavior of Facebook users. Future research may deploy focus group methods or in-depth interview in addition to survey to gain more insights of the research topic.
The sample size of 249 is not huge in comparison to the large population of Taiwanese Facebook users. Future research may carry out a large scale survey to gain deeper understanding and overview of the population and their behavior. Social media are a fast changing communication platform, so are the users and their behavior. Social science research on online social behavior may become increasingly important in the quest to understand how and why people behave in certain patterns.
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