The use of online social networking sites to nurture and cultivate bonding social capital: A systematic review of the literature from 1997 to 2018

Any social phenomenon with more than a billion participants daily is ripe for investigation into the implications of social capital. This research conducts a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature and conference material published between 1 January 1997 and 31 March 2018 regarding the question, can the use of online social networking sites cultivate and nurture an individual’s bonding social capital? The systematic review using EBSCOhost, EndNote, and final manual review process has aggregated 54 articles containing 116 distinct studies resulting in 85 answering in the affirmative to the research question. These studies are coded into a 13-category framework to provide a roadmap to future researchers. The results are wide and varied providing data from large and small groups. Generalization of the results supports the research question in that individual bonding social capital can be cultivated and nurtured via use of online social networking sites.