[Air-l] air-l Digest, Vol 35, Issue 23

[Eszter Hargittai]

Hi,

I have some quantitative data to address the issues raised by danah thanks
to the MacArthur-funded project we're undertaking in my Web Use Project
group. (See below for details about the data set.)

Based on a sample of 1,236 very diverse college students, there is a
statistically significant positive relationship between use of Facebook and
the parental education level of students (a standard proxy for
socio-economic status).  We also find a statistically significant negative
relationship between parental education and use of MySpace.

The data also suggest statistically significant differences in use by race
and ethnicity, but I'll have to report on specifics later since I just
cleaned the data set and am still working on some recodes.

Although unfortunately I cannot be there, several students (Soo An, Dan Li,
Gina Walejko) from my research group will be at the C&T2007 meeting at
Michigan State this week presenting at the workshop on social software.
Although they won't be talking about this specific issue, they will be
discussing all sorts of findings from our study.

Regarding the data set, just to clarify, this is in not a convenience sample
of college students. We administered a paper-pencil survey to students in
the one class at the University of Illinois, Chicago that is required of all
students thus posing no selection bias as to who was in the sampling frame
from the university. We have a 98% response rate of the 85 course sections,
and an 82% response rate of all students enrolled in the class. I could go
on and on about how the sample is diverse, but regarding the above-mentioned
variable of parental education, over a third of fathers and almost half of
mothers have a high school education or less, while about 42% of fathers and
40% of mothers have a college or graduate degree. About 77% of the sample
reported using Facebook sometimes or often, while that figure is 54% for
MySpace.

Also, as additional information, the focus of this study was not SNS use per
se, these questions make up a very small portion of the entire data set.

More later as we make progress in analyzing the data.

Eszter

Eszter Hargittai
Assistant Professor
Departments of Communication Studies and Sociology
Northwestern University

2006-2007 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences,
Stanford

http://www.eszter.com

On 6/25/07, air-l-request at listserv.aoir.org <air-l-request at listserv.aoir.org>
wrote:
>
> Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:02:16 -0700
> From: danah boyd
> Subject: [Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and
>         MySpace
>
> A week ago, folks were talking about class divisions around Facebook
> and MySpace use in teen culture.  I was in the middle of writing an
> essay about that exact topic(and some folks have heard me speak to
> this issue over the last few months) so i didn't want to peep up
> until i had written what i could.  I finally gave up and realized
> that I didn't have the proper words for talking about this issue so I
> wrote an essay with caveats.  I offer it to you to tear to shreds in
> the hopes that maybe some good can come out of it.  (I didn't include
> the full text here because it's long - i hope the link doesn't
> discourage folks from checking it out.)  Feedback is *very* welcome.
>
> Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
> http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
>
> [Barry - i disagree with your view that it's just local clustering
> dependent on a random local seed.  I've seen this in too many schools
> in too many states in the United States to believe that this isn't
> about class.  I can't speak to Canada or Britain or anywhere else.  I
> also can't speak to adult usage.  I'm talking solely about high
> school teen usage in the US.  If you've got ideas for how to measure
> this quantitatively when demarcating class is difficult, i'm all ears.]
>
>