Social Media and Challenges to Iranian Family: a Study on Facebook Membership and its Impact on Family Privacy

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Abstract

This paper attempts to analyze the consequences of using Facebook and how it affects Iranian couples, especially where family privacy is concerned. To put it in other words, the paper offers an argument on the question of how Facebook membership challenges stability of the family system in the Iranian society.  A special focus will be laid on Facebook and its effect on transforming social norms of family private borders. Furthermore, it will be argued whether Facebook is the sole determining factor or other factors also intervene in affecting Iranian family privacy limits. In order to address such questions, we will employ the family systems theory as the theoretical framework. Methodologically, and for the purpose of deepening our understanding of Facebook membership, a qualitative method approach is taken in which the focus is put on using the grounded theory in order to analyze the data and formulate the findings. Online and face to face focus group interviews as well as online interviews were used in order to gather the necessary data.  Then, the results were analyzed based on a grounded theory approach in an attempt to discover theoretically sound patterns. Some of the findings showed that Facebook membership only facilitates family privacy developments and the interactive media could not be considered as the sole factor in the transformation of Iranian family systems. Finally, the transformation of privacy in Iranian families ranges from micro individual to macro societal levels, specially in regard with the clarification privacy border families.

Keywords

Journal of Social Problems of Iran
Volume 7, Issue 1
January
January 2017
Pages 228-203

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics