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Sheetz, Steven D.; Fox, Edward A.; Fitzgerald, Andrew; Palmer, Sean; Shoemaker, Donald J.; Kavanaugh, Andrea L. (2011)
Communities respond to tragedy by making virtuous use of social networking sites for a variety of purposes. We asked students to describe why they used a social networking site after the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, then evaluated their responses using content analysis. Students went predominately to Facebook (99%). Most (59%) of the 426 students that responded went there because their friends were already there, and to find out if their friends were OK (28%) (and to let them know they were OK). Ideas related to relationships occurred more frequently in the responses than ideas related to the website's features. However, the ease of use of the website was mentioned often (22%). The results suggest this emergent phenomenon will recur.