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@listserv.aoir.org <air-l-request@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.]