I had to write a SSHRC proposal for the research I want to do in the next few years. It details the ideas mentioned in this blog, in a more refined form. The SSHRC deals with looking at Facebook and physical structural at the school level, which complements the provincial level stuff.
I am putting this project on hold until I hear back from them. It would be a fun idea to work on, but right now I need to focus on my thesis. And as much as I love this work, I would like to be funded for it, as opposed to working on this out of my own pocket.
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This 2007 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, and 2006 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study, which reports noticeable changes from previous years, is based on quantitative data from a spring 2007 survey and interviews with 27,846 freshman, senior, and community college students at 103 higher education institutions. It focuses on what kinds of information technologies these students use, own, and experience; their technology behaviors, preferences, and skills; how IT impacts their experiences in their courses; and their perceptions of the role of IT in the academic experience.
Link: http://connect.educause.edu/library/abstract/TheECARStudyofUnderg/45075?time=1190063935
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Here is my pre-publication draft for a poster submitted to the Society of Research on Adolescence‘s Biannual Conference in Chicago. Hot off the press.
What have I found in this report? The same things I have reported in the last few posts.
1. There are about 41% of Canadian teens on high school networks. However, this also means that there are teens that don’t necessarily identify with the school and are listed as ‘no network’, or that belong to a regional network. So there might be more.
2. PEI ( 61.61% ), Ontario ( 59.26% ) and British Columbia ( 50.63% ) have the highest facebook use. While Quebec ( 8.49% ), Nunavut ( 7.51% ) and Saskatchewan ( 19.58% ) have the lowest facebook use.
3. There is a relationship between the population density of a province and facebook use.
4. There is a relationship between the amount of English speakers in the province and facebook use.
Please take a look at it and let me know if you have any comments.
WARNING: PDF FILE
The Geography of Facebook: Provincial Factors in Adolescent Social Network Participation
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Facebook Survey
Here is a facebook survey if you are bored ( not mine ):
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There seems to be a great deal of moral panic around social network use, specially with series like “To Catch A Predator”.
A recent report by the National School Board Association, which represents 95,000 local school board members that govern 14,890 local schoos in the United States, shows that these fears are overstated.
Some tasty morsels:
Personally directed incidents, which are of serious concern to students, parents and educators, are relatively rare. About one in 14 students (7 percent) say someone has asked them for information about their personal identity on a social networking site; 6 percent of parents concur.
About one in 14 students (7 percent) say they’ve experienced self-defined cyberbullying; 5 percent of parents concur. About one in 25 students (4 percent) say they’ve had conversations on social networking sites that made them uncomfortable. 3 percent of parents concur.
Fewer than one in 30 students (3 percent) say unwelcome strangers have tried repeatedly to communicate with them online; 3 percent of parents concur. Only about one in 50 students (2 percent) say a stranger they met online tried to meet them in person; 2 percent of parents concur. Only .08 percent of all students say they’ve actually met someone in person from an online encounter with out their parents’ permission.
The vast majority of students, then, seem to be living by the online safety behaviors they learn at home and at school. School district leaders seem to believe that negative experiences with social networking are more common than students and parents report. For example, more than half of districts (52 percent) say that students providing personal information online has been “a significant problem” in their schools, yet only 3 percent of students say they’ve ever given out their e-mail addresses, instant messaging screen names
Read More: Creating and Connecting (PDF)
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Extending on the previous “How is this Data Collected Post”, here are some modifications made to the Facebook capture infrastructure that I am proposing:
Step 1: Profile and Network Data Capture – chickenfoot and firefox browser. Writing out to text files.
Three sources:
- Facebook.com for actual usage data
- Ministry of Education in British Columbia for School Demographic Data
- Statistics Canada for Geographical Data
Step 2: Data Matching - MySQL database
- All the data mined from the websites is then formatted and put into different tables in the MySQL database. The bulk of this work will involve matching the geographical and school data with the data in Facebook.
Step 3: Data Analysis - SPSS
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I wrote a script that went to the classmate search for every school in British Columbia [ i.e. http://www.facebook.com/classmate.php?hs=66530&hr=2007 ] and retrieved the number of seniors in the high schools.
Here is a little breakdown:
There are 530 high schools listed for British Columbia
In total, there are slightly over 49,038 seniors on Facebook in BC*
97 of these high schools do not have any students graduating in 2007
4 schools have over 550+ graduates in 2007
On average, each school has 92.5 graduates in 2007 on Facebook ( SD=133. 62 )
The chart below shows the distribution of seniors per school
The beauty of the classmate search is that it provides those students who are not enrolled in the high school networks, but that indicate their affiliation to the school in the education field.
The next step is to see which networks these students are in and evaluate how their friendship networks grow over time, specially during transition into work and school.
*Facebook only returns the first 550 records of each search, 4 schools have over 550 students.
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The latest issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communications has a great article about facebook and social capital. ( http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html )
One of the more interesting suggestions for future research:
Future research could explore Facebook use in other contexts, such as organizations and high schools. Because we used a one-time survey, we cannot establish causality. Additionally, the extremely low incidence of non-members, non-White, or international students in our sample hampered our ability to assess the effects of Facebook membership on these groups. Finally, respondents may have misreported behavioral or demographic information, as we used self-reported rather than direct measures of Facebook use and other variables.
To address these concerns, future research should approach Facebook use and the generation of social capital via multiple methodologies. Profile capture and analysis would allow researchers to marry survey responses with direct behavioral measures. Additionally, experimental interventions would support causal claims; these interventions could be in the form of a survey, with pre- and post-test data collected from the site itself. Collecting longitudinal data over a series of years, tracking incoming first-year students and following them after they graduate, is also a necessary next step.
This idea is exactly what is being done with this project – which is very reassuring since it shows there is merit to writing tools to study facebook. Hmmm, I wonder if they are hiring programmers :p
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| Province |
Students On Facebook |
Number |
Population |
Percentage on |
| Alberta | 77,804 | 209 | 231,352 | 33.63% |
| British Columbia | 134,328 | 288 | 265,292 | 50.63% |
| Manitoba | 41,104 | 147 | 83,530 | 49.21% |
| New Brunswick | 19,789 | 53 | 46,320 | 42.72% |
| Newfoundland and Labrador |
13,690 | 74 | 31,780 | 43.08% |
| Northwest Territories | 575 | 4 | 3,582 | 16.05% |
| Nova Scotia | 26,618 | 78 | 58,842 | 45.24% |
| Nunavut | 241 | 4 | 3,210 | 7.51% |
| Ontario | 489,343 | 841 | 825,780 | 59.26% |
| Prince Edward Island | 5,950 | 14 | 9,657 | 61.61% |
| Quebec | 40,411 | 250 | 476,630 | 8.48% |
| Saskatchewan | 14,100 | 102 | 72,015 | 19.58% |
| Yukon | 1,037 | 9 | 2,212 | 46.88% |
| Canada Total: | 864,990 | 2073 | 2,110,202 | 40.99% |
Population estimates: ( 10-14 year olds + 15-19 year olds ) / 2
Source for population: Statistics Canada Census Data 2006
What is the deal with Quebec?
Population Percentage sans Quebec: 50.48%
It could be the language. French speaking teens in Quebec might opt to use French social networks like NetLog.com ( formerly www.facebox.com ).
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There are 2,013 high schools networks on facebook.
Largest High Schools On Facebook
Fredericton High School, Fredericton, New Brunswick: 2,219 students
Saint John High School, Saint John, New Brunswick: 2,459 students
St. Joan Of Arc Catholic High School, Maple, Ontario: 2,721 students
There are 16 school networks with 7 students. 72 schools are listed but do not have enough students to show a student count.
On average, high school networks have 419 students
In total, Canadian high school networks have 843, 063 students
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- An infrastructure for profile capturing facebook
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