Abstract
In the Fall 2014 semester, the ESL
5301 class decided to conduct a study about social media. We were curious about
how Texas Tech students use social media and we decided to conduct surveys as a
data collecting method. Our study had several phases. First, we read some
articles about social media and summarized them; secondly, we wrote our
introductions and literature rewiews; then each student prepared some
hypotheses; next, we prepared and conducted our survey. In total 152 Texas Tech
students filled out our survey. Next steps were organizing the survey results
and discussing the results. In the end, it was an interesting study; we had
very interesting hypotheses and some suprising findings. We believe that this
study will lead the way to further studies about social media.
Introduction
As
time passes by, the usage of social media is getting more common among people.
Although some people might think that they are harmful for everyday
communication, they are indispensable communication tools for the recent
generation. Cherie Burbach states that the social media have changed the way
people communicate with each other in a negative way; on the contrary, social
media helps us to keep in touch with family members or old friends more easily
compared to the past (Burbach, n.d.).
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Snapchat,
Vine, and Tumblr are only some of the popular ones among the college students’
huge variety of social media tools. Some of them are getting more popular; some
of them might lose their popularity over time. According to John McDermott,
some of the usages of the social media among college students, as of November
2013, were Facebook 88.6%, Instagram 51.5%, Twitter 43.7%, Tumblr 35.5%,
Snapchat 25.9% and Vine 25%; in addition, while the usage of Facebook was
decreasing, other social media sites were getting more popular among college
students (McDermott, 2014).
Also, college students use different social media web
pages for different reasons. As McDermott stated, for example, while Facebook
users tended more to keep in touch with their old friends or family members,
Twitter users were using Twitter more for expressing themselves easily; on the
other hand, college students preferred Snapchat due to the feeling of keeping
safe what they shared (McDermott, 2014). Molly McHugh explained the usage of
Facebook and Twitter as: “Facebook
is a repository of someone’s life, where Twitter is like a thought-stream, at
least in terms of usage” (McHugh, 2013,
p. 6).
In the Fall 2014 semester, the class of ESL 5301 conducted
research about Texas Tech students’ use of social media. Since social media are
enormously popular, we thought it would be useful and interesting to study how
Texas Tech students were using social media. In this research, each student
conducted different research about some topics, for example, the reasons
students used the social media, how frequently they used them, which social
media they preferred for different purposes, whether social media affected
their success and other topics, by making surveys with the contribution of
Texas Tech students. Each individual in the class stated hypotheses and tried
to find out whether they were confirmed or not. I will provide information in
the methods section about how this research was conducted.
Literature Review
There are many different statements and questions
about social media. The most general questions about social media are about how
many people are using them, and what the different usages between different age
groups, genders and races. Mislove et al. conducted research to find out how
many Twitter users there were in the United States and how gender, race and
geography affected the usage of Twitter (Mislove et al., 2011). They found out
that Twitter users were mostly represented by male users; however, their research
represented a non-random sample (Mislove et al., 2011). It is very difficult to
find out the number of users of social media; we can, however, get an
approximate percentage of Texas Tech social media users. In addition to that,
Fink et al. found out in their research that male and female users had
different reasons to use social media (Fink et al., 2012). According to the
Thiago Guimaraes (2014), the numbers of social media users are increasing and
Facebook is the most popular one. He indicated that more than 84% of the web
users in North America had Facebook accounts and females were using Facebook a
lot more than males (Guimaraes, 2014).
In our survey, we could simply ask both male and female Texas Tech
students which social media they preferred and how they used social media.
Another claim about social media is that social media
might be harmful for its users in many ways. Eric Moore, for example,
introduced research conducted by Marc Eric Dyken in his article; according to
that research, teenagers spent time on social media at bedtime and it caused
many problems like sleep disorders and fatigue during the day (Moore, 2011). We
wanted to know if this was true for Texas Tech students. In our survey, we could
ask Texas Tech students whether they checked social media at bedtime or not and
whether they believed checking social media at bedtime caused them sleeping
disorders or not. I believed that Texas Tech students checked their social
media at bedtime, but they would not believe that checking social media at
bedtime was causing sleeping disorders. We could also try to find out whether
Texas Tech students believed the social media affected their college success or
not. Mary Bart introduced a study in her article and the study found out that
there was no relationship between grades and social media usage (Bart, 2010).
In our study, we thought we might verify that Texas Tech students believed that
there was no relationship between grades and social media usage; however, I
believed that the students would admit social media disrupted them while they were
studying.
A different
claim is Kylie Burchart’s statement that the usage of social media has negative
effects on communication; social media are making people more introverted and
people have stopped communicating with their friends face to face because of
the instant messaging ability (Burchart, 2013). Ryan Masin and John D. Faubert
also supported this claim by stating, “Those who use Facebook more intensely
report a lower quality of interpersonal relationships than those who do not use
Facebook as intensely” (Masin & Faubert, 2013, p. 55). We are asked Texas
Tech students if they used the instant message feature of social media web
pages and we could ask them whether they preferred communicating with their
friends on messenger or face to face. In my opinion, Texas Tech students would
state that they were more likely to prefer sending messages than doing face to
face communication.
According to the Ryan Lytle, social media encourages
people to make donations, and it has become easier to create fundraising than
before (Lytle, 2014). According to his research, 64% of the social media users
donated more than $100 last year (Lytle, 2014). In summer, there was a very
popular fundraiser among social media users called “ice bucket challenge” for
ALS research. Briefly, social media users poured a bucket of ice on their
heads, and donated $10 to the ALS Foundation, and challenged their friends to
do the same through social media. If they did not pour the ice and challenge
other friends in 24 hours, they would have to donate $100 to the ALS
Foundation. It became very popular in a very short time and many people,
including celebrities, got involved in the challenge. We thought it would be
very interesting to check how many Texas Tech students participated in the ice
bucket challenge, and how much they had donated. I believed a large number of
Texas Tech students were challenged by their social media friends and
participated in the ice bucket challenge.
Hypotheses
§ Students will admit that they check social media while
driving.
§ Females will admit that they check social media while
driving more than males.
§ Most of the Texas Tech students will admit that they
are checking their social media accounts at bedtime.
§ Texas Tech students believe that checking the social
media in bedtime will not cause sleeping disorder.
§ Female students check their social media at bedtime
more than male students.
§ Texas Tech students will state that they do not
believe social media affect their success in a negative way.
§ Most Texas Tech students have participated in the ice
bucket challenge and donated to the ALS Foundation.
Methodology
Texas
Tech University is located on an 1839-acre campus in Lubbock, Texas. With
35,134 students, Texas Tech is considered one of the best universities in the
state of Texas (Texas Tech). Texas Tech University is a public research
university; it has students and academics from all over the United States and
the world. In general, Texas Tech University has all of the common features
that any American university has. It has students from every state, so Texas
Tech University could be considered as a representative university for the
United States.
In
order to collect data, the students and the professor of the ESL 5301 class
decided to conduct a survey. The class made some rules for conducting surveys
and all of the students agreed to follow them. These rules were: Every pollster
had to have at least ten American Texas Tech students, five males and five
females. It did not matter if they were undergraduate, graduate or Ph.D.
students. Other than those ten students, pollsters could conduct the survey
with as many international students, American students or non students who had
connection with Texas Tech (for example Texas Tech alumni); there were no
restrictions on the gender. After the agreement was made, the students started
to conduct surveys.
The
survey consisted of twenty-four questions in total. The first part was about
general information about the students (What is the gender, nationality,
graduate or undergraduate?). The second question asked the students about which
social media they used and how frequently. Starting from the third question,
the survey asked questions about the hypotheses that students had created
during the literature review section. The last question was about the
motivation of the student’s usage of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. One survey
sample has been included in the appendix section. (See Appendix I) The survey had both hard copy and online
version; they both had the same questions. One of our team members, S.
Valipoor, prepared the online version of the survey. In order to fill out the
online version of the survey, students needed to open our class blog, click the
link of our survey and fill out the survey. In total, 152 surveys were filled
out; 15 of them were online, 137 of them were hard copy version. S. Valipoor
and C. Rios Blanco worked on the excel file to organize the survey results.
After the surveys were conducted, each student wrote a short story about how
they conducted the surveys and they mentioned the difficulties that they
encountered. The most common difficulty that pollsters encountered was that,
people generally did not fully fill out the first question, because the parts
of it were not easy to see. They usually checked the gender but didn’t read the
other information. I believe I overcame that problem quite well; before they
started to fill out the survey, I introduced them to the parts of our survey. I
warned them that the first question asked about demographic information and
asked them to read that part carefully. As a result, none of my filled out
surveys missed any demographic information. We will discuss the results in the
results section.
Results
In
this section, the results of the surveys will be introduced. In total 152
surveys were filled out. The numbers of female students were slightly more than
that of male students who filled out the survey; however, they were very close
in number. The number of female students who filled out the survey was 80; the
number of male students was 72 (53% female, 47% male). The majority of the
people who filled out the survey were undergraduate students. 56% of the people
said that they were undergraduate students, 39% were graduate students and 5%
of the people described themselves as other. The people who were filled out the
survey were mostly Americans. 79% of people were Americans and 21% of the
people were internationals.
Before
I move into the results, I would like to mention some interesting facts that we
encountered while we were collecting the data. After the students of ESL 5301
class turned in their surveys, our professor asked everybody to write a story
about their data collection process. After I read all the stories, I caught
some interesting points. Overall, people filled out the surveys willingly and
most of them thought our survey was interesting. One of the people who filled
out the survey said that he met his wife through social media; they are having
a happy marriage and they have a baby boy. Another interesting story is while a
lady was filling out the survey, she said that “Facebook is the devil!” and
explained how much she hated social media; she even told a story about one of
her classes that required her to use Twitter but she hated it. One of my
friends told me that he hated the ice bucket challenge a lot and he thought it
was useless; on the other hand, there were some people who said they
participated in the ice bucket challenge and it was fun.
Other
than our individual hypotheses, all of the team members wanted to discover
which social media people used more and how frequently they were using them.
The different social media usage between males and females gave us interesting
results. The results of the survey indicated that most of the students at least
had a Facebook account. Only 5% of the people who filled out the survey said
they did not know or use Facebook; 95% of the people reported they used
Facebook or at least had an account. The numbers of female and male users of
Facebook were very close to each other. 51% of people who reported they use
Facebook were female, 49% of them were male. Our study indicated that the
numbers of people who did not know or use Twitter were a lot more than those
for Facebook. 30% of the people who filled out the survey reported that they
did not know or use Twitter. The numbers of female and male Twitter users were
very close. 51% of the people who reported they used Twitter were female, 49%
of them were male.
The next result that we received from our survey was
most of the students used YouTube. 82% of the people who filled out the survey
reported that at least they had an account. The numbers of female and male
users of YouTube were almost equal also. 51% of people who reported they used
YouTube were female and 49% of them were male.
Our results indicated that most of the students knew
and used Instagram. 65% of the people who filled out the survey reported that
they had at least an Instagram account. 59% of the people who reported they
used Instagram were female, 41% of them were male.
According to our survey results, more than half of the
students did not know or use Pinterest. 43% of the students who filled out the
survey reported that they had at least a Pinterest account, 57% of them
informed us that they did not know or used it. Mostly females were using
Pinterest, and males did not know or use it. Of the people who said they used
Pinterest, 85% of them were female and 15% were male.
Another result that our study indicated was that most students
had at least a Snapchat account; 59% of the students informed us that they used
Snapchat. When we took a close look to the users of Snapchat, we realized that
most of the users were female. 58% of the people who reported they used
Snapchat were females, 42% were male.
Our survey results indicated that the majority of the
students did not know or use Ello. 97% of the people who filled out our survey
reported that they did not know or use Ello. The users of Ello were mostly
males. The users were 75% male, 25% female.
Another result we got from our surveys was most of the
students did not know or use Vine. Only 34% of the students who filled out the
survey reported that they used Vine. The users of Vine were mostly females. 65%
of the users were female, 35 % were male; 77% of the users were undergraduate
students, 23% were graduate students.
Lastly, according to our survey, almost half of the
students at least had a Google + account. 52% of the students said that they
used Google+. 56% of the users were males, 44% were females; 48% of the users were
undergraduate students, 47% were graduate students and 5% were other.
In my
hypotheses, I was looking to find out answers to these questions:
§ How the Texas Tech students feel about texting while
driving,
§ Do they ever check social media while driving,
§ Do they check their social media before they sleep,
§ Do they believe checking social media before they
sleep affected their sleep,
§ Are social media bad for friendship,
§ Do social media affect their grades,
§ Did they participate in the ice bucket challenge and
how did they feel about it?
Our study indicated that most of the students believed
checking the social media while driving was always dangerous. 59% of the people
who filled out the survey reported that it was always dangerous, 28% of the
people said usually it was dangerous, 11% of the people said sometimes it was
dangerous and 2% of the people reported that they believed it was not
dangerous. Mostly females, graduate students and international students were
very strict about checking social media while driving and they reported that it
was always dangerous. 60% of the females, 61% of the graduate students, and 71%
of the international students reported it was always dangerous. 1% of the females, 3% of the males, 2% of the
graduate students, 2% of the undergraduate students, 2% of the American
students and 0% of the international students said they believed it was not
dangerous.
On
the other hand, our study indicated that most Texas Tech students checked their
social media while driving. 40% of the students reported that they never checked
their phone while driving; 28% of the students said they rarely checked, 28% of
them said they sometimes checked, 4% of the students said they checked social
media often while driving. According to our results, female students checked
social media while driving more than male students; undergraduate students
checked social media while driving more than graduate students; and American
students checked social media while driving more than international
students. 34% of the female students,
47% of the male students, 53% of the graduate students, 29% of the
undergraduate students, 63% of the other, 34% of the American students and 63%
of the international students said they never checked social media while they were
driving.
We found that most of the Texas Tech students checked
social media in bed before they slept. Only 5% of the students reported that
they never checked their social media accounts before they slept. 56% of the
students said they often checked social media in bed before they slept. 6% of
the female students and 4% of the male students; 8% of the graduate students,
1% of the undergraduate students, 25% of the other; 5% of the American students
and 6% of the international students said they never checked social media in
bed before they slept. According to our results, most of the students believed
checking social media before sleep had at least a mild effect on sleep. 36% of
the students reported that checking social media in bed before sleep had no
effect on their sleep. 39% of the students said there was mild effect on sleep,
25% of them said they believed it had a bad effect on their sleep patterns. In
general more than a third thought it had no effect, and this was true for all
demographics. 36% of the female students, 36% of the male students; 44% of the
graduate students, 34% of the undergraduate students; 35% of the American
students and 41% of the international students said they did not believe it had
an effect on their sleep.
Our
results indicated that most of the Texas Tech students were neutral about the
effects of social media on friendships. 63% of the students answered this
question as neutral, 10% of the students said negative and 27% of the students
said that they believed social media were good for friendships. According to
our results, more male students reported that they believed that social media
was good for friendships than female students. While 36% of the male students
reported social media were good for friendships, 31% of the female students
stated social media were good for their friendships.
According
to our results, most of the Texas Tech students believed that social media had
no effect on their grades. 72% of the students reported that social media had
no effect on their grades. 2% of the students said it was good for their
grades, and 24% of the students said it was bad for their grades. 63% of the
females, 83% of the males, 90% of the graduate students, 62% of the
undergraduate students and 50% of the others said the social media had no
effect; 31% of the females, 15% of the males, 10% of the graduate students, 62%
of the undergraduate students said it had bad effect; 3% of the females and 1%
of the males said social media had a good effect on their grades.
Our study
indicated that most Texas Tech students knew about the ice bucket challenge and
they felt it was good for the ALS patients. 79% of the students reported that
they knew about the ice bucket challenge, 18% of the students said they
participated in it, and 3% of them said they did not know about the ice bucket
challenge. 49% of the students said they believed the ice bucket challenge was
good for ALS patients, 28% of the students said it was pointless and 23% of the
students said they had no opinion about it.
In the discussion section, I will be discussing the results of the
surveys.
Discussion
Even
though our study was not a perfect scientific study, we received many
interesting results in the end. One of our limitations with this study was that
we had only 152 people who filled out the survey. With more funding
opportunities we could have conducted close to 2000 more surveys, and the
results of these surveys could be more representative for the Texas Tech
University students. Another limitation we had was that the only data we had
was what people reported to us as a result of conducting the survey. We did not
measure the people’s actions; we only measured what people reported. We could
not check the validity of what people reported and we accepted as true what
people reported to us.
In
this section, the results of the surveys will be discussed. Firstly, the usages
of different social media will be discussed. Our results showed that Facebook was
the most popular social media among the Texas Tech students. While we were
summarizing the articles we found, the statement that McDermott made got my
attention. According to him, the number of students who were using Facebook was
decreasing and other social media web sites were getting more popular
(McDermott, 2014). After I read his article, I was expecting the number of
Facebook users and Twitter users to be about the same. However, our results
indicated that Facebook was still the most popular social media type among
students. The number of Twitter users was less than I had expected.
Another
interesting result was the numbers of YouTube and Google+ users. According to
our results the numbers of YouTube and Google+ users were pretty high. I was
expecting fewer users of both of these social media types. I believe the reason
behind that result is that all of the Google accounts are connected. If a
person registers for YouTube or Google+, that person will automatically be
registered on any Google provided account; or if a person has a Gmail account,
that person can login to any Google products like YouTube, Google+, Google Play
and others. Our survey results verify that situation. Most of the people who
filled out the survey reported that they only had a Google+ account. I believe
it was all because Google forces people to sign up all Google accounts. On the
other hand, the numbers of YouTube users were not close to those of the Google+
users. I believe that people are not aware of the fact that they can access all
of the Google provided web pages with same Gmail account they have.
My
first two hypotheses were about checking social media while driving. My first
hypothesis was, “Students will admit that they check social media while
driving.” According to our results, 60% of the students reported that they
checked their social media while driving, so my hypothesis was confirmed. On
the other hand, most of the students believe that it is dangerous to check
social media while driving. The results indicate to us that people feel guilty
about checking social media while they are driving. In our surveys, some
students reported that they check social media only at stop signs. My second
hypothesis about checking social media while driving was: “Females will admit
that they check social media while driving more than males”. Our results
validated this hypothesis; 66% of the female students and 53% of the male
students reported that they checked social media while driving. I believe the
reason behind that result is that females are more obsessed with checking what
is happening in people’s lives.
The
next three hypotheses that I had were about checking social media at bedtime
before they sleep. The first hypothesis was: “Most of the Texas Tech students
will admit that they are checking their social media accounts at bedtime”. Our
survey results support this hypothesis. Only 5% of the students reported that
they never checked social media in bed before they slept. Although the results
supported my hypothesis, I was not expecting that much difference in numbers. I
believed that people checked their phones in bed to fall asleep more easily.
The second hypothesis was: “Texas Tech students believe that checking social
media in bedtime will not cause sleeping disorder”. However, our results
indicated the opposite. According to our results, 36% of the Texas Tech
students believed that checking social media in bed before sleep had no effect
on their sleep. 39% of the students reported that it had a mild effect on
sleep, and 25% of the students believed it had a bad effect on their sleep. I
believe that the reason that social media affect people’s sleep is the social
media notifications. If people don’t get their phone in silent mode, the
notification alerts will wake them up. This result was quite surprising for me.
The third hypothesis was: “Female students check their social media at bed time
more than male students”. Our results indicated very close results for this
hypothesis. 54% of the females and 56% of the male students stated that they
checked social media at bedtime. Although the difference was not significant,
the survey results had proved my hypothesis wrong.
The
next hypothesis that I had was: “ Texas Tech students will state that they do
not believe social media affect their success in a negative way”. Our results supported that hypothesis. 72% of
the Texas Tech students reported that they believed social media had no effect
on their grades. However the number of students who believed social media had a
bad effect on their grades is considerably higher. 24% of the students reported
that they believed social media had a bad effect on their grades. The reason
behind that result is that social media disturb students while they are
studying. I believe that if students are studying their classes on their
laptops, they most likely will check their social media for a while. Some
students keep it too long and in the end they cannot study for their classes.
The
last hypothesis that I had was: ”Most of the Texas Tech students have
participated in the ice bucket challenge and donated to the ALS Foundation”.
Our results indicated that most of the students knew about ice bucket challenge
but not many of them participated in it. 78% of the students reported that they
knew about ice bucket challenge but only 18% of the students reported that they
participated in it. That result was surprising for me, because I was expecting
more people to have participated in it. The ice bucket challenge was very
popular in summer time and many Facebook users, even many celebrities
participated in the ice bucket challenge. Another interesting result was only
49% of the students reported that the ice bucket challenge was good for ALS patients;
I was expecting more people would think positively about it.Short videos of
people dumping ice on their heads made a strong impression on everyone, and
they were very memorable, so, we all had the impression that most of the
students participated in ice bucket challenge, however, our results did not
completely support this impression.
Conclusion
In
conclusion, social media have a very important part in our lives and it was
very interesting to study. Even though our study was not a perfect scientific
study, we got many interesting results in the end. In our study, we only had
152 surveys filled out and we measured only students’ reports not their actions.
Further study can be made to discover people’s actions with social media with
appropriate equipment and measurement tools. Comparing people’s reports and
actions can be a very good idea. Finally, I believe that all of our team members’
hypotheses were very strong and can be used in different studies. - Serdar Kaleli
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