STUDY: Facebook users have lower grades

This study done at our great Big Ten counterpart, Ohio State University, found that Facebook users spend 1-5hrs/week studying, while students that don't use Facebook study 11-15hrs/week. This makes me wonder: are people that are inherently more social less inclined to study? Or, instead, do people who wouldn't study anyway become more social? It's not clear from the study whether this is correlation or causation, in other words.

I wouldn’t really link using Facebook to being more social. There are other ways to be social and I know some of my friends decide not to use Facebook because they would rather contact their friends directly. While Facebook is great for those people that you have only met once or twice and never intend to see again, it is a less personal connection with those in your social network. I also don’t think there is necessarily a correlation between using Facebook and inclination to study. Using Facebook may take time away from studying, I know that I use it as a study break, but I don’t think people study less because of Facebook. What I find interesting is knowing if many people use Facebook for studying purposes. On ocassion, I like to go on Facebook when I have questions because I know that there are always many people on the chat feature; I find Facebook chat more convient that gmail’s chat. People are more often on Facebook than gmail. In addition, I feel better about asking a question on Facebook because I know that people on Facebook are social networking at that moment and are therefore more willing to answer questions. This idea is contrary to the argument presented; might Facebook actually be a good source of studying?

This study makes me think of how people who play a lot of video games tend to have lower grades. Is this because they are not social enough and just overwork themselves? Probably not, it just means that they spend too much time playing video games and not enough studying. The same can be true for facebook users, if they spend 5 hours or more per week on facebook, maybe in fact they are more social and tend to go out more and party, and not study, etc. OR perhaps that while they are in the library and supposed to be reading and taking notes on their computer, they decide to get sidetracked and look at facebook because they are bored.

No conclusions can really be drawn from this story, correlation is not causation. If facebook didn't exist, you can change this study by substitution facebook with websurfing and you'd still probably find that kids found to be websurfing more than 5 hours a week, tend to have lower grades. I think it has more to do with the time wasted on social networking, on games, w/e, than the content these games and sites provide.

Article about how time wasted on video games, not actually video games themselves, probably leads to lower grades:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2007-09-18-videogame-GPA_N.htm