Netiquette Between Students and Their Lecturers on Facebook: Injunctive and Descriptive Social Norms

There is an ongoing discussion if and how students and lecturers should interact with each other on social networks. In this article, we present an empirical study on the so-called netiquette for Facebook contacts between students and their lecturers (hereinafter called SL-contacts). In addition, we investigated the subjective perception of the majority's behavior. This enabled a comparison between two different kinds of social norms: the injunctive norms (netiquette) and the descriptive norms (majority). Database was an online survey with 2,849 participants (2,550 students and 299 lecturers). SL-contacts were quite rare in our sample and usually initiated by students. Our results showed that the appropriateness of SL-contacts depends on the individual case. In addition, we found that injunctive and descriptive norms are in line with each other. Overall, our results indicate that there is a common ground of understanding, and SL-contacts are less critical than they might appear.