[Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

[Eszter Hargittai]

Hi,

It just occured to me that I had neglected to include an important piece of
information in my post about our study. The data I reported on here were
collected in February and March, 2007.  Curiously, no one wrote to me for
clarification even though this piece of info is important.  (I just hope
people read updates about various data sources critically and with care.)

On a related note, I find the dynamics between the following two issues
intriguing on this list. On occasion we see people expressing
hostility/ambivalence/skepticism toward quantitative work. At the same time,
there are quite a few messages asking for baseline information about the
demographic breakdown of users of various services. I hope people realize
that without the former, the latter's hard to achieve. And what may seem
like a quick figure can take considerable resources (time, labor, money) to
compile. Of course, thoughtful and constructive criticism of work is always
welcomed, however, outright dismissal of entire methodological approaches
does not seem helpful.  And of course, the role of quan work is way more
than to provide baseline figures, but it's a helpful component.

Eszter

http://www.eszter.com

On 6/26/07, Eszter Hargittai wrote:
>
> 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