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.