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 predominantly 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).