The Social Capital of Iranian Instagram Users

Instagram is a virtual social network for sharing photos and videos on mobile phones. Considering around 23.5 million Iranian users of Instagram, it's unclear if Instagram activities and users’ relationships are delivering any benefits. Therefore, the research hypothesis is: the social capital generated by Instagram users is likely to be higher than that of Instagram's non-users. To test the hypothesis, two groups of Iranian Instagram users and non-users with Internet-connected smartphones were selected as the statistical population for comparing social capital. On the basis of Putnam's definition, we considered social capital with three dimensions: bonding social capital, bridging social capital, and trust. The method of data collection is reverse online survey method. Sample size was of 1033 determined by the sample size determination method for large communities. The questionnaire link was sent for 15,000 email addresses. The comparison of the mean scores indicates that the social capital means of the two groups of Instagram members and non-members did not have a significant difference, that is, the social capital of Instagram members is not greater than the social capital of non-members. Besides, the bonding and bridging virtual social capital with these two dimensions of social capital is not different in Instagram users and  non-users, but the amount of trust in the real environment is more than that in Instagram environment. This reduction in trust on Instagram seems to be due to the lack of physical contact in this virtual environment.