Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.24.09 | The recent press barrage about a supposed link between Facebook use and lower grades among college students came as a surprise to grantee Eszter Hargittai, who is studying how college students use social networking and other internet sites.

As she wrote on her blog, those stories ran counter to what she was finding in her study of college students’ use of social networking sites. She posted a riposte here.

As only social networking sites can do, she quickly found herself connected to several colleagues, with an invitation to coauthor (with Josh Pasek at Stanford and eian more at University of Pennsylvania)  a response in First Monday, an online peer-reviewed journal.

The article is called, Facebook and Academic Performance: Reconciling a Media Sensation with Data.

Here’s the abstract:

A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school (Karpinski, 2009). The report quickly became a media sensation and was picked up by hundreds of news outlets in a matter of days. However, the results were based on correlational data in a draft manuscript that had not been published, or even considered for publication. This paper attempts to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14- to 22-year-olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14-23. In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non-users.

For the full article, go here.