STUDY: Facebook users don't actually have lower grades.

Earlier in the quarter I posted this thread which cited a study from Ohio State University that said Facebook users have lower grades than non-users. However, a recent (more rigorous) study done right here at NU says social networking does not play a role in grades. This is more than just a prime example of bad data used by the OSU study -- it also suggests that more social people are not poorer performers, as one had to conclude after reading the original OSU report. So keep making those connections (strong and weak) but not during the hours you're supposed to be studying.

Thats interesting... and good to know. I read your post earlier this quarter about the students who use facebook having lower grades, but I must say that I and most all of my friends use facebook and I have not seen any detrimental effects in my academics. While it's true that facebook provides simply one more way to procrastinate and waste time on the internet, I think that it can also help people with their academic pursuits as well. Facebook is a great way to send out surveys and disseminate other information, including seminars and other academic talks. Also it's a great way to communicate with your study/project groups.

That makes sense; Facebook is just one of the many ways that one could procrastinate instead of studying. I agree that it could also act as an aid to academics. It is easy to reach many people for surveys because your weak links are included in your facebook social network. Your connections to these people might even increase the response rate, as we talked in the very beginning of the quarter about how you are most likely to hear about a job by someone outside of your main social network.

One can not infer casualty just from a statistical correlation. In this case, having statistics between facebook users and non-users and their grades can not conclude that facebook causes a low correction on an individual's grade.

It may be the case that people who have low grades naturally spend more time not studying and spend more time on other activities, facebook being one. But you can not conclude that facebook actually causes people to shift time from studying to checking facebook. There are also variations between the hours spent between different facebook users.

In order to draw such conclusion about facebook's casualty, there needs to be an extensive controlled study of group of people who initially did not use facebook, and measure their behavioral changes after using facebook for a month or a longer time.

Ching-Yen Pai wrote:One can not infer casualty just from a statistical correlation. In this case, having statistics between facebook users and non-users and their grades can not conclude that facebook causes a low correction on an individual's grade.

It may be the case that people who have low grades naturally spend more time not studying and spend more time on other activities, facebook being one. But you can not conclude that facebook actually causes people to shift time from studying to checking facebook. There are also variations between the hours spent between different facebook users.

In order to draw such conclusion about facebook's casualty, there needs to be an extensive controlled study of group of people who initially did not use facebook, and measure their behavioral changes after using facebook for a month or a longer time.

I have to agree with this. Just because two things have a correlation does not mean it's a direct correlation or a direct response to a certain phenomenon. For instance, there's been a very long ongoing debate on how gun control correlate to the number of crimes in a country. Sure, it may not be the same in other countries. What's ironic is in some countries where there is no gun control, there aren't many crimes (i.e. Canada). However, there are some countries who don't experience the same outcome like South America.

From the OP, now, if you want to look at this at another prospective, I guess this NU study can reinforce the fact our reliability and image of how our school conducts studies better than other schools do, in this case OSU. This will make it from an outsider prospective how our rigorous studies are trustworthy, and it'll hurt the reputation of these other schools.

Ching-Yen Pai wrote:One can not infer casualty just from a statistical correlation. In this case, having statistics between facebook users and non-users and their grades can not conclude that facebook causes a low correction on an individual's grade.

It may be the case that people who have low grades naturally spend more time not studying and spend more time on other activities, facebook being one. But you can not conclude that facebook actually causes people to shift time from studying to checking facebook. There are also variations between the hours spent between different facebook users.

In order to draw such conclusion about facebook's casualty, there needs to be an extensive controlled study of group of people who initially did not use facebook, and measure their behavioral changes after using facebook for a month or a longer time.

I agree with you that there is a distinction between correlation and causality that the OSU researcher seems to have missed. But how did this happen? Shouldn't a graduate-level CS researcher be aware of this distinction and able to formulate hypotheses including it?

It is refreshing that the research done here at our own institution seems to be a lot more rigorous. I would love to see a much more extensive study done about this!