This paper critically examines a study by Kalpidou, Costin, and Morris (2011) investigating the relationship between Facebook use and the well-being of undergraduate college students. The paper summarizes the study's key findings — including the differing effects of Facebook on first-year versus upper-class students' academic, social, and emotional adjustment — and then evaluates the study's methodological limitations. Particular attention is given to the study's unrepresentative gender distribution, which skewed heavily female in a sample of only 70 students, raising questions about whether conclusions regarding social behavior and emotional adjustment can be generalized to undergraduates as a whole.
Kalpidou, Costin, and Morris (2011) use standard social science methodology to correlate Facebook use among college students with measures of self-esteem and adaptation to college life. Facebook use was measured according to a survey devised by the authors, rating emotional and social connection to Facebook, but also according to the number of hours spent on the website and the number of "friends" on the site. The survey population deliberately included a mix of first-year college students and upper-class students, on the basis that the latter would have an "established social network" already (p. 184).
The researchers found that a larger number of Facebook friends was associated with poor academic adjustment in college, and that this effect was worse for first-year students. Academic adjustment also correlated with poor emotional adjustment, suggesting that "Facebook use, like Internet use, does not fulfill emotional needs" (p. 187). They also discovered that the amount of time spent on Facebook does not correlate with these adjustment scores, even though the number of friends does.
Among older students, better social adjustment scores were associated with a larger number of Facebook friends — suggesting, in the words of Kalpidou, Costin, and Morris, that "upper-class students use Facebook more effectively than first-year students do." This difference reflects first-year students using Facebook to compensate for the stress of adjusting to a new environment — and finding that Facebook offers little emotional assistance — while older students use it to bolster an already established real-life social network. This interpretation is supported by the additional finding that the older student group reported greater "attachment to the institution" (p. 188). Part of the older students' more effective use of Facebook, then, consists of more effectively reinforcing online the social connections that already existed in real life.
The chief flaw in the methodology employed by Kalpidou, Costin, and Morris lies in the composition of the sample population. They used "70 undergraduate" students as their sample, of whom "67%" were female — in other words, approximately 47 women and 23 men. In a study of social behavior, a sample in which the ratio of women to men is 2:1 is a significant problem. Accepting such a ratio requires several assumptions that would need to be addressed scientifically before the study's broader claims could be taken at face value.
Do women measure self-esteem differently from men? As one example, anorexia nervosa is a psychiatric disorder that profoundly affects self-esteem, and only an estimated 5 to 15% of those diagnosed with it are male. Does women's social behavior differ markedly from men's? And most saliently, what is the actual gender proportion of Facebook users overall? A March 2011 estimate indicated that a slight majority of Facebook users were male (51.2%) rather than female (48.8%), though this figure reflects worldwide use rather than American users specifically.
"Limits of applying findings to all undergraduates"
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.