This brief post is to announce that our preprint has been accepted for publication in Cyberpsychology. This project was carried out by Riana Brown, an MRes. intern at the time, now a PhD student at New York University, together with another intern. We asked people to extract their own Facebook data. We were hoping that some of the social network metrics would relate to loneliness. For example, perhaps those with denser networks would be less lonely. But we found very little support for this. We only found a negative relationship between the size of one’s Facebook network size and self-reported loneliness. I should also state here that I have a conflict of interest, I have received funding from Facebook Research for a different project. This project started in 2015 and is only now published (2021). Just to give you an idea how long it can take between carrying out a piece of research and having it published. Now let’s hope that in the future - there is less of a lag!
In that vein, our preprint exploring the factors underpinning a nerdy personality is now accepted at the Social Science Journal. This one took less long but it still took us long :). Great to have these papers accepted, especially given that involve former students.