Monday, December 1, 2014

Social Media Study by Serdar Kaleli

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
References
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