What is Social Sharing? A Scoping Review of Operationalisations of Social Sharing

Social sharing is the process of talking about an emotional experience with another person(s), including what happened and how they reacted. This construct is broad and comprises many components, which makes it difficult for researchers to map their operationalisations onto this definition. We believe that inconsistent operationalisation may contribute to mixed outcomes of social sharing. We conducted a scoping review to understand how social sharing is operationalised in empirical research, and to determi-ne what proportion of social sharing research captures central features of the process. After screening 1,352 published and unpublished articles, our final sample comprised 100 articles, including 126 studies, empirically investigating social sharing of emotion. We found that operationalisations varied widely and focused on different components of the process across studies, many not mapping onto the key definiti-on. This suggests that mixed findings on outcomes of social sharing may be partially due to the field being unclear and inconsistent about what we are assessing. These findings may point to broader issues with conceptualisation and measurement of key constructs in emotion research in general, thus hampe-ring us from creating a cumulative science.

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