Facebook, Grades, and Media Hype Hype

A researcher at Ohio State University has found that students who use Facebook reported earning lower grade-point averages than nonusers of the social-networking service. But the researcher, Aryn C. Karpinski, said in an interview with The Chronicle that she did not have enough data to determine whether Facebook use causes students to do poorly in their studies, despite a string of media reports that she says overstate her findings.

Ms. Karpinski, a doctoral student in the university’s college of education, surveyed 102 undergraduates and 117 graduate students at Ohio State last summer and fall. She said Facebook users reported GPA’s in the 3.0-to-3.5 range, while nonusers reported GPA’s between 3.5 and 4.0. And she found that nonusers reported spending more time studying than the Facebook users did.

Other researchers were quick to question her findings, including Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, in a post on the blog Crooked Timber. She warned against jumping to conclusions in survey research — the classic reminder that correlation does not imply causation. And she said that in her own study in 2007 of more than 1,000 first-year students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she found no correlation between Facebook use and student grades.

Ms. Karpinski says she never argued that Facebook was causing poor academic performance, just that she found a connection and that more should be done to study the matter. She planned to present her findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. “I completely acknowledge the limitations of my research,” she said. “What I found is so exploratory — people need to chill out.”

She said that she has seen conflicting studies on the topic and that the question is far from settled. “Once people start doing more and more research in this area, we’ll see a pattern develop,” she said. “Until then, we’ll have to take everybody’s different study at face value “

http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 55, Issue 33, Page A13