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Since its release in February of 2004, the online social network known as Facebook has had over forty-three million members register. This website allows people to find and connect with friends, send messages, create groups based on beliefs and interests, create and advertise events and create detailed personal profiles. With Facebook and internet use becoming so popular (and reachable via school labs, libraries, etc), Facebook itself is supposedly becoming the main way of communication for a majority of people. Facebook as a mean of communication impacts youth from elementary schools to high schools to universities. It also impacts working and unemployed adults and, in some cases, seniors.

But what about other means of communication such as phone calls, chat rooms and instant messengers, emails and talking in person? Is the high use of Facebook really because it happens to be convenient or are people becoming too lazy and rushed to take the time to write a letter or email? People add supposed “friends” to their Facebook accounts but do they treat them like friends and talk like friends do? Would the person bother to take the effort to communicate with the supposed “friend” outside of Facebook? What we’re asking here is basically: is Facebook taking over the world of communication?

Facebook is becoming increasingly popular among people young and old, but especially the young. Facebook is the latest fad, and it’s becoming a huge part of pop culture. This is affecting our society because the meaning of true communication is deteriorating. “Facing Facts on Facebook: Are you really over him as you think?” written by Sarah Lolley discusses how people go on Facebook for three main reasons. Reason number one is being a popularity contest which can help raise or emphasize a person’s status, number two is contacting old friends and number reason three is looking up your past significant others. This article suggests that Facebook is becoming a social utility for communication among adolescents.

The article “The Virtual Cutting Edge: The Internet and Adolescent Self -Injury”, written by Janis L Whitlock, discusses the prevalence of increased internet use among adolescents. The author believes that the rate is so high in adolescence because it serves the “purpose of connecting with others” (Whitlock, 2006). This article supports the fact that adolescents are using internet as a main source of communication thus taking away from the rate of in-person communication. “More then 80% of the American youth 12 to 17 years of age use the Internet and log on daily. Research shows that however adolescents use the internet mainly for social reasons,” (Whitlock, 2006).

In another article, written by Naomi S. Baron, it is argued that computer-mediated communication does provide opportunities for adolescents to increase their social interaction. However, in the end, it’s solely in the hand of parents, how they were brought up and their traditional views about communication. The author argues that if the person is grounded in their family traditions, they will not resort to using online communication systems as their main form of communication.

The chosen independent variables are females versus males and full-time students versus full-time employees. We chose females versus males because females tend to very actively socialize in crowds, especially ones which enforce conformity, whereas males, although social, tend to be more laid back regarding social networks. The hypothesis is that females will be registered with and use Facebook more then males because it used as more of a popularity contest. It also allows for more diverse communication between friends and family.
Students versus employees was chosen because students have more time and reason to access the internet. Students normally have a more active social life and have access to the internet via libraries and computer labs whereas full-time employees have the tendency of not having time or putting time towards a social life. Accessibility to leisurely internet activities may be limited to these employees as well therefore they most likely use other forms of communication including phone calls and chatting in person. Therefore, the hypothesis for full-time students versus full-time employees is that students will be more likely to be registered with and spend more time on Facebook. Students will utilize Facebook more then employees because most students are young and are familiar with technology and online communication.

In this research study, a full-time student is defined as any respondent who is a registered student at Loyalist College and is taking over half of the required courses within the semester. We defined a full-time employee as any respondent who is working at least 30 to 40 hrs a week.

Fortunately for this research project, use of a questionnaire was chosen over other methods (interviews, etc) for being cheaper and because conducting them takes less time. General disadvantages of conducting questionnaires include possible irrelevance of the topic being researched to those being questioned, the inability to generalize the results, misinterpretation of questions by the participants and the possibility that respondents could record fake answers. Also, the use of questionnaires can have the inability to appeal to certain groups in society including seniors, children and the handicapped.

In our questionnaire, we used dichotomous questions including “your gender: male or female”, “are you a: full-time student or full-time employee” and “do you check your Facebook account daily: yes or no”. Dichotomous questions are multiple choice questions where there are only two options to choose from. This allowed for us to differentiate between the people representing our independent variables. It also allowed a simple analysis regarding whether or not a majority of responding Facebook users check their accounts daily.

One multiple choice question was used, see the questionnaire (question 4), regarding how much time per week our responding Facebook users spend on Facebook itself. This gives us a more in-depth look at how relevant Facebook is in our respondents’ weekly timeframes. A rank-order question was also used, see the questionnaire (question six), to determine the ranking of Facebook as a main mean of communication versus other methods including talking in person, phone calls, emails, etc.

The people studied were those who represented our independent variables. These people included and were limited to male and female full-time students and full-time employees. To reach our full-time student respondents, twenty questionnaires were conducted in the Parrot Centre of Loyalist College during regular class hours. To reach our full-time employed respondents, the remaining questionnaires were conducted during a weekday in the early afternoon at the Quinte Mall, a time when a majority of the mall workers happen to be full-time. Because we had four independent variables (male versus female and employee versus student), our goal was to have a total of twenty females and twenty males. Twenty of these would hopefully be full-time employees while the other twenty would be full-time students.

To get our sample, stratified random sampling was used. From our populations of full-time students and full-time employees, we randomly chose twenty of each using their gender as the stratifying variable. A general advantage of stratified random sampling is that one can improve how well the sample represents a population.

Collected Data

Amount of respondents registered with Facebook

Time/week spent on Facebook, whether users check it daily

Facebook’s percentage of priority in communication ranking

Previously, we hypothesized that regarding males versus females, the majority of Facebook registration and use would be done by our female respondents. This hypothesis turned out to be correct. All twenty of our female respondents were registered and active on Facebook. Our questionnaire found that 85% of the females, with males standing at 82%, spend more than thirty minutes using Facebook per week.

It was also hypothesized that full-time students would be more likely to be registered and active with Facebook than full-time employees. This hypothesis also turned out to be somewhat correct. Out of our twenty responding full-time students, 95% (19/20) were registered with Facebook. With our twenty responding full-time employees, 90% (18/20) were registered with Facebook. 84% of the Facebook-using students spend more than thirty minutes per week on the website. However, more than thirty minutes are spent on Facebook by 89% of the full-time employees who are registered.

Conclusion

To elaborate on the discussion of the results’ correlation with the hypothesis, out of the twenty female users, 70% of them check and spend time on Facebook on a daily basis whereas only 53% of our male respondents do so. 63% of the registered full-time students take part in Facebook activities daily compared to 61% of registered full-time employees.
Despite previous research stating a majority of youth now use the internet as one of their main means of social interaction, our own research found that a majority of our female respondents (42%) and male respondents (32%) use Facebook as their 4th most commonly used communication device. Regarding our students and employees, our full-time students prefer to use Facebook as their 3rd and 4th (tied at 32%) means of communication but our full-time employees use it as their 4th (47%) and 5th (21%) ranked means of communication. Just by looking over the completed questionnaires, we were able to see that most of our participants preferred to use more personal means of communication including talking on the phone or face-to face.

With a majority of our respondents having some sort of income or financial assistance, most of them can afford to have phone lines which could be a factor in why such personal means are preferred. Another thing is that some of them can’t afford their own computers so even though there is usually easy access to computers in labs and libraries, the amount of time one can spend on Facebook, and the internet as a whole, is effected

Regarding our sampling method, one could say we cheated the stratified random selection of our sample because we made sure we had twenty students and twenty employees. Then we made sure we chose an equal amount males and females. However, we can say that there was indeed randomization because once we found our students and employees and found groups of males and females from each category; we randomly selected males and females from those gender groups.

We believe the content validity, which is concerned with the coverage quality of the covered content (i.e. how much time is spent on Facebook), is decent because we cover a wide variety of dependent variables (number of hours spent on Facebook, which methods of communication are used). During the research study as a whole, we had a great amount of inter-observer reliability. Even though Deneem and myself worked independently most of the time and had different samples (she worked with the students, I worked with the employees), we gained similar, correlating results.

With there being hundreds of students at Loyalist, a few hundred Quinte Mall employees and only a total of forty respondents in our study, it can be argued that our study lacks generalizability. If we had a larger sample of chosen students and employees, our findings would be more applicable to larger populations of students and employees.

Some limiting factors during our study included time. Different aspects of research take more time than others so with a limited amount of time; we had to be very time-orientated. We also made our own, and tried to meet, personal deadlines to ensure everything would get done within an appropriate timeframe. Another limiting factor was the availability of the people within our samples. Most of our students did not hesitate to take the time to fill out our questionnaire. With the employees, some new respondents had to be selected because some of the originally selected employees were unable to participate because of being too busy or because of rules set by their place of employment.

Ethical considerations included anonymity. With the questionnaires being anonymous, respondents would be more likely to write down truthful answers than if they had to write their name with their answers. We also gave respondents rights of privacy by not asking in-depth questions such as what exactly they do or talk about when communicating with others.