Communication through social media: Evaluating people’s perception about language stereotypes (MCRB)

Abstract

Language use by gender and age is commonly reported to have differences. The raising of internet and social media as the dominant communication tool in the present also shows different characteristics in language use. However, with new tools as emoticons, photos, updates and abbreviations inside modern language, it is important to know how people perceive it. We presented a survey to 152 Texas Tech University students and some other non-students in Lubbock to see how they perceive the use of language in social media. We found that most of the people disagree with traditional stereotypes for males and females about language use. Nevertheless, we also found that the use of emoticons, abbreviations and status updates follow these stereotypes suggesting that people didn’t realize how these differences among genders really reflect previous reported stereotypes.

  

Introduction

Nowadays, keeping in touch with friends and relatives is more important than ever in our history. Technological advances in communication let people write, talk and even have video conferences with people thousands of miles away. In this technological growth, social media have become one of the most important tools to interact between people. Social media have also changed completely the way we communicate with each other. Language change is probably one of the most interesting aspects of those changes. Differences between sex and age show the beginning of a new era in communication, when people 25 years and older learn and adapt to the social media, while people between 16 to 18 years old have used these resources since they were really young (Schwartz et al. 2013).  In this paper we want to look into social media language differences among Texas Tech University students. Also we want to go further in understanding how social media as one of the most important communication strategies today is perceived by the students.

Literature review

Social media captures more interest every day. More than 1/7 of the world population uses Facebook or Twitter (Schwartz et al. 2013). This growing pattern of use of social media allows people to communicate with others and express themselves in a more personal way. Also, according to Alter (2014) in social media the way they want to be perceived by others seems to be more important to people than their real thoughts. The combination of high interaction between people in real time and expression of feelings, mood and status updates, allows researchers to obtain a high volume of information when personal and common language is used (opposite to books that are written in an impersonal language) (Argamon et al. 2007).

Language differentiation between gender and age has been an interest of many researchers for a long time. Usually the hypothesis in this topic states that is possible to identify with some grade of certainty the age and gender of a writer based on the word use (Mulac et al. 2013). More recently it has been reported that other good predictors of gender and age will be style and topics (Pennebaker & Stone 2003; Argamon et al. 2007).

When it’s related with sex, articles, prepositions and informational words are used mainly by males, while females use personal pronouns, auxiliary verbs and emotion words more than males (Argamon et al. 2007; Schwartz et al. 2013). It’s also been reported that males use more possessive words (like “my”) and object references, and women use adjectives to describe their partner and talk more about relationships (Argamon et al. 2003). When the comparison is based on the social interaction, females post more photos and are more interested in other people´s relationships; males tend to look for the number of friends and professional achievements (McAndrew et al. 2012). In terms of age, younger people use emoticons, abbreviations and words related to real time status (like home, fun, beer); in older people topics related with professional development, politics and family increase their importance (Argamon et al 2013; McAndrew et al. 2012; Schwartz et al. 2013).

Despite the fact that language studies are common, and the behavior according to age and sex were well described, there is no evidence of how people think about these statements, or whether people are conscious about differences between ages and sex in language use in social media. The study of age and gender relationships with language in social media is far from over and new data is available every day.  Also we want to look into Texas Tech students´ perception of the social media as well as the language used by females and males in two different age groups (undergraduate and graduate students). Finally like no other studies before, we wanted to go further in these language stereotypes and ask people how they think about that. We want to know whether people agree to the general statements that were made in terms of language use in social media.

Methods

Study site

The university chosen to make the research was Texas Tech University (Lubbock, Texas). The university hosts 13 colleges and more than 150 courses (n.a. Texas Tech Facts 2014). Although most of the students are from Texas and southwestern United States, the school has students from all the country (95%) and more than 106 foreign countries (5%). The enrollment for fall 2014 was more than 34,000 students (Table 1) (Cook 2014). 

Agreement

In order to obtain the information for this study we made an agreement. Each member of the research did at least 10 surveys. The conditions of these surveys were that the surveyed people had to be Texas Tech students, from the United States. The distribution by genders were 50% of each. Each extra survey collected could be of any kind of people (international, not student, graduate or undergraduate). No one of the research members helped or gave advice to answer the survey and each person was free to answer or not the questions of the survey.

Survey

The survey was made according to the suggestion of all of the members of the research team. Each question was selected in order to test different hypotheses. The survey first asked about gender, if the person was an international or American, and if he or she was a student. The next section of the survey had 21 simple multiple-choice questions and three complex multiple-choice questions about different activities in social media. The questions used for this research were numbers 16 to 21 (see appendix 1). The survey had a printed version and an online version (made by S. Valipoor) with the same structure and questions.

Data analysis

We systematized all the information (paper and online surveys) and we built a matrix where each question was categorized and standardized.  The surveys that presented incomplete demographic information (sex, student type and whether the person was American or International) were excluded from the matrix. We used all surveys with complete demographic information in the analysis. In order to compare between student type and gender, we calculated the percentage of people who answered in all the questions. To facilitate the representation of the results we made graphs for each question where differences were shown.

Results

We obtained 152 surveys with complete demographic information. Around 15 additional surveys were not complete and they were not taken into account. The distribution between genders was almost 50%. This percentage was similar in American, International, undergraduate and graduate people (Table 2). In terms of graduate students (59), this group was less represented that undergraduate students (85); however, the distribution by gender in these two groups was similar.

When we asked in the survey about people’s opinion of typical stereotypes of language use in social media, most of the people agreed that the emotional words were used more by women than by men (Figure 1). However, the opinions about emotional words use by females were more evenly distributed among males (yes 27% vs. no 20%) than in females (yes 41% vs. no 11%).  In addition, females thought that they used more emotional words than males’ opinion about female emotional word use (Figure 1).

However, when we asked about use of possessive words such as “my” by men, most of the people disagreed with this statement. In this case there was a difference of around 4% between the opinion of females and males (Figure 2). Females were more likely to report that they didn’t believe this statement than men.

Most of the people surveyed reported that they used social media to look for friends’ photos and friends’ status updates. More females tended to use social media to see friends’ photos than males, while males used social media to see friends’ status updates more than females. The use of social media by gender didn’t show strong differences. There was a slight difference between what females reported in their use of social media to see more friends’ photos than what males reported (49% vs. 35%). Other activities were similar, with no more than 5% of differences between genders (Figure 3). The activity with the least interest for the surveyed people was the political use of social media (Figure 3). The social media use by undergraduate and graduate students showed a similar pattern, where the most popular uses were to see friends’ photos and status updates. However, the results didn’t show strong differences among undergraduate and graduate students (no more than 3%).

The use of emoticons and abbreviations was reported by the majority of surveyed people. Most of the people use these tools sometimes. Only 15.8% of the people reported that they never use emoticons, and 25.7% never use abbreviations (Figure 4). Also, we found that there are more people who reported that they always use emoticons (21.1%) than people who reported the use of abbreviations always (10.5%). Finally, we found a possible relation between emoticon use and abbreviation use because around 80% of the surveyed people who reported that they use emoticons, also reported the abbreviation use.

As for the emoticon use by gender, both males and females reported using emoticons usually and sometimes more than other options. We didn’t find strong differences when emoticons use were reported as “usually” and “sometimes”; however, we did find differences between females and males when people reported that they “always” and “never” use emoticons. There were more females who reported that they always use emoticons while males strongly said more than females that they never use emoticons (Figure 5).

As for the abbreviation use, most of the females and males reported that at least sometimes they use abbreviations. Females reported using them sometimes and always more than males, while males reported more using them never and usually than females (Figure 6).

The differences in use of emoticons and abbreviations for graduate and undergraduate students didn’t show differences in most of the answers. However, the use of abbreviations did show important differences. Graduate students said more commonly that they never use abbreviations than undergraduate students as well as they reported to use always abbreviations less than undergraduate students (Figure 7).

In terms of status updates we found important differences by gender. Most of the surveyed people reported not updating their relationship status; however, there was a slight difference between males and females (around 3%). When people reported that they update their relationship status, there was a difference where males tend to update less than females (Figure 8).  In general females are more or less evenly split in opinion about relationships updates in social media (no update 27% vs. update 23%) while males strongly report that they don’t update relationship status (no update 30.9% vs. update 11.2%). Only 8% of the people reported that only under pressure they update their relationship status; in this 8%, males tend to update relationship status under pressure more than females (Figure 8).

When we analyzed the relationship status updates according to student type, we found that there was a slight difference between graduate and graduate students. Undergraduate students tended to report that they updated their relationships less than graduate students (Figure 9). When they reported that they updated relationship status only under pressure, there was no difference between undergraduate and graduate students (Figure 9).

Discussion

Although there is a high volume of evidence that shows how language use by females and males is different and follows specific an stereotypic believe (Schwartz et al. 2013), our results showed that there was not a consensus between people’s opinion about these stereotypic characteristics of language use by gender. However, is interesting how more people tend to believe in female emotional words use than people who believe in possessive word use by males. These results suggest that despite the fact that there is evidence of this kind of differences, people didn’t perceive them or are against the belief of gender stereotypes.

The use of social media was very similar by gender. A few people were interested in politics and professional development while most of the people reported that they used social media for the most traditional uses (friends’ photos and friends’ status updates). According to our analysis, we found that females tend to use social media more to see friends’ photos while male use more social media to see friends’ status updates. These results are similar to what McAndrew et al. (2012) found but, unlike their study we didn’t find an important tendency of professional development use more by males. These results could be the product of the general questions that we asked in the survey. It is possible that these results could be different if we had asked or analyze the different pages that the people were subscribed to.

The emoticon use were reported by the vast majority of surveyed people. This shows how emoticons have become an important tool in modern communication language. Nowadays, most of the communication is through emails and social media where use of emoticons has proven to be useful to show the tone of a conversation (Jayasinghe 2014). In terms of use by gender, we found that males reported never using emoticons more than females. This is consistent with the emotional use of emoticons and its relation with female language tendencies. Finally, it’s also important notice that more than 20% of the surveyed people always use emoticons, and how that can be problematic in professional academic environments (Reshwan 2014).

This use can be also extrapolated to abbreviation use that is not well seen in academic environments. According to this we did find differences among undergraduate and graduate students, where this last group reported to use abbreviation far less than undergraduate students. These results can reflect a tendency of the behavior among these different students. Graduate students are used to being more involved in academic environments than undergraduate students. In addition, the use of abbreviations can also be seen as a modern style, where people want to text more rapidly; furthermore, young people could want to hide the real meaning of some messages from older people (Mills & Cheer 2014).

The abbreviation use by gender was similar to what we found in emoticon use where males tend to use abbreviations than females less frequently. This suggests that females were more worried about speed while texting and probably coded some text. There is the possibility that we can disentangle these abbreviation behavior with questions about abbreviation use in with different groups like friends, family, academics, etc. as well as the use of this abbreviations in different contexts like friends interaction, flirting or academic communication.

The relationship updates differences by gender can be an important insight into how females and males communicate. Most of the people didn’t report relationship updates; however, this can be imprecise due to three factors. The first is just because they didn’t want to admit the updating; therefore, they didn’t report it. The second cause could be the sample size that we use; it’s probable that with a bigger and better representative sample size of Texas Tech University students, this differences could be more evident. Finally, the other cause of this could be that most of the people probably didn’t report relationship updates at the specific field of “relationship update”; rather they updated their status through the traditional status or with a tweet or hashtag.

When people reported that they updated their relationship status, males tended to do this less than females. These results can reflect the emotional aspects of communication where females are more open to sharing emotions in public than males (Argamon et al. 2003).

As for the relationship updates among undergraduate and graduate students, we found that the relationship updates being more common in graduate students than in undergraduate students. This shows us an interesting behavior among the surveyed people. At first appearance, undergraduate students could be more immature, and this could lead more relationships updates. However, the results can be explained through two different factors. First, graduate students tend to have more stable relationships and will be more confident to publish their relationship status. The other option could be the small sample size which didn’t reflect Texas Tech students’ population and therefore behavior in terms of relationship status updates.

It would be interesting to ask people why they update or do not update relationship status. In addition, this opinion can be different under specific circumstances. For example, long term relationships will be more susceptible to being publish and updated in social media, in comparison with short term relationships. Also not just the relationship status can be important. When couples go through crucial moments like marriage proposals or ending of the relationship, people can publish a different status related to their relationship, but still not consider it as a “relationship update”. Also it is interesting that people reported that they updated relationship status only under pressure. It’s possible that there will be more people under these circumstances but due to the small sample size this number was low.  Asking what kind of pressure and what people think about this behavior would be really interesting.  

There is more information around relationships that we didn’t ask and can be the manifestation of people’s language use in social media and could show important insights into not just language use but into how people perceive those differences among sex and age.

Conclusion

We found several differences between females and males that show us how they communicate through social media. Despite much research has been done suggesting specific language patterns, most of the people didn’t believe in those kind of stereotypes. However in the other information that we analyzed (like emoticon use and status updates) they followed this general pattern that females tended to communicate using more emotional tools than males.

In terms of undergraduate and graduate students as a category to separate different age we didn’t find strong differences. However these results can’t be skewed by the sample size of graduate students who were far less than undergraduate students.

Finally, there is still more to consider about language use and how people perceive this. There is more research needed to understand how differences in data of language use from of how people perceive it. Cultural statements of equality can be a model of people’s opinion about stereotypes despite the fact that there is evidence of differences among genders.

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Appendix 1