Academic
Writing Course 5315:
Analysis
of social media issues in the Texas Tech Community
Cheng-Ta
Cho
Texas
Tech University
Abstract
Social media plays an important role in
our young generation lives; thus, we are interested in understanding their
conceptions about this issue. To get the information, we, academic writing
course 5315, designed a survey to understand their opinions about social media.
This article is talking about the results of the survey and its analysis.
Basically, we want to see the difference between different groups including
male and female, undergraduate and graduate students, and also find a little
fact about Texans and non-Texans by analyzing the results of the survey. This
article also provides some previous literature for the information related to
this research. In conclusion, we got desired information and make a solid
analysis.
Keywords: social media, Tech
community, survey, American students
Introduction
Social media brings lots of convenience
in our life; however, it also leads to some negative impacts toward students.
In the past, communicating with friends or families who were in long distance
is limited. The only method for them to contact with each other is the phone.
Now, we can use social media to easily send a message to our friends or
families, even though they are offline. Besides, social media can help us find
the old friends that we lost connections for a long time. Despite the advantages
it brings us, it still results in some issues especially for students. In the
ESL5315 academic writing course, we want to understand the conceptions of Texas
Tech University students. Texas Tech University is located in Lubbock, Texas.
In this school, it is full of students from the U.S.A or other countries as
well as different genders, and the enrollment is around 35,000. We would ask
around two hundred students to fill out the survey we design. Although two
hundred students are not statistic accurate and not able to represent the whole
student body, the purpose is that we would like to learn from their responses.
We are interested in social medial issues and I am especially interested in how
social media affects their lives. Students may have various opinions towards
the social media issues. For example, when being asked what negative impacts
that social media cause, some may say lose some privacy, while other may say
too much information. After analyzing those surveys, we can fully understand
different students’ thoughts and opinions about these issues. This result can
be provided for the future academic use when the topic is related to this
issue.
Literature
Review
The first question we address here is
how social media affects students’ lives. According to this article (Karadkar,
2015), one of critical impacts is "identity crisis" which means that
student can create a virtual identity through the social media, and it gives
them freedom to do what they want. Whenever one of their friends posts a
certain thing, they would be forced to do the same thing to reflect their
emotions. As a result, their behaviors would greatly be affected by their
friends rather than their parents and teachers. Besides, a survey (Davis, 2013)
shows that frequently use of social media would lead female first-year college
students to get poor grades. They also found that average time for using social
media is 12 hours a day which is a surprising number. Schill (2011) also claims
that social media encourages teen to negative behaviors such as drinking or
drugs. Apart from the negative impact upon student; there are still many
advantages for student to use. For example, Dunn (2011) mentions that students
using social media can improve rate of collaboration with others. Because of
spending much time on the new technology, students would be more aware of and
be more creative of computer science and other electronic devices. A survey () demonstrates that teenagers
feel more positive than negative toward the social media. For example, in more
than one thousand corresponds, approximately 28% of them said that social media
makes them more outgoing, while just 5% feel less so. In this article, it also
shows that around 29% of them said the social media makes them feel less shy,
but only 3% of them said it make them feel more shy. These results clearly
point that teenagers think that they benefit from the social media than subject
to them, and this can be applied to the undergraduate students of Texas Tech
University.
The next question we want to discuss is
that do we feel happy when using the social media? A study in (Leopold, 2015)
shows that "social media actually makes you depressed" (Leopold,
2015, para1). The reason is that social media is like a part of human being.
Through the social media such as Facebook, you would also find others always
have better lives than you do and this is where depression comes from. Another
study (Widdowson, 2016) also shows the same results. According to their
research, the more time spending on the social media websites, and more
frequently visiting to the social media websites would lead to high level of
depression. Possible reason is that the upset people are strongly depend on
social media websites. The interesting is that other research finds the
opposite results. According to Park (2014), the research demonstrates that
being on Facebook can actually make us happier.
They also find an interesting fact. A positive post on Facebook can
minimize two times of negative post. For example, if we see a post that would
make us happy can actually lower the influence of two posts that would make us
unhappy. Indeed, most of time, researchers would focus those detrimental
effects toward people. However, it is ourselves to decide how we use the social
media. Erin (2014) puts the strong emphasis on stopping the comparisons. She
also describes the social media as the place "where we are in a
never-ending competition with our friends" and "people would get down
when this situation becomes too much and too stressful" (Erin, 2014, para.5).
According to the author, happiness is the key to make you feel energetic, and
enthusiastic by posting some joyful moments on the social media websites, but
we have to remember is that this is not a happiness competition.
Another important issue is that whether
social media would actually affect our health? In (Probst, 2015),
this article demonstrates several ways that social media possibly affect our
health especially for the mental. The most common one is social media is
addiction. Many people use social media for "distraction and boredom
relief" (Probst, 2015, para.5).
The reason why people would get addition to the social media is that they can
like or comment to reinforce themselves by posting the information. Other
factor is that "social media makes us restless"(Probst, 2015, para.7). According to the author, around two-thirds
of people cannot relax when they are not able to use social media. In (Whiteman, 2015), the researchers found
that people are more anxious and socially insecure are more likely to use
social media websites. This research also shows that people who are addiction
to the Facebook is taking this way as getting the attention and enhancing the
self-esteems. Indeed, these behaviors are detrimental to our health. According
to Dr.
Rauch, "We know that many people on social media sites
often present idealized versions of their lives, leading others to make upward
social comparisons, which can lead to negative emotions" (Whiteman, 2015, para.4). In addition, a survey (Whiteman, 2015) investigated that two thirds of participants have
difficulty relaxing and sleeping after using the social media websites.
Besides, other research (Udorie,
2015) demonstrates that teenagers
who use the social media would increase the level of the anxiety and depression
as well as damage their sleeping. The
separate study also found that
"girls seek comfort on social media when they are worried" (Udorie, 2015, para.5). This result shows that girls are
more likely to experience the stress than boys do.
Hypotheses
1.
We expect that
female students would report that they use social media more frequently than
male students do, primary because when female feel lonely, they tend to use social
media to find some company or chat with their friends and many literatures also
support this fact.
2. There are many articles debating whether social
media would bring students happiness. In my opinion, I think that they would
claim that using social media would make them feel happier than not using it.
3. According to my observation, Facebook is the social
media website most students use frequently. I believe more than 50% our student
respondents in the Texas Tech like it best.
4. Since social media plays an important role in the
students’ lives, I speculate that undergraduate students would use social media
more time than graduate students do.
5. In my opinion, Texas Tech University students who
are originally from Texas are less likely to be in favor of government control
of the personal privacy in social media than other Americans from other states
are since from the previous experience, they didn’t want the government to
interrupt their business.
Methods
section
In the academic writing 5315 course, we
wanted to know 300 Texas Tech students’ perception of the following issues:
social media, parental leave, and Black Lives Matter. I wanted to know their
perceptions about social media. I wanted to compare the female and male students
with respect to their frequencies of using the social media. Which group says
they use it more frequently? I also wanted to know how the social media
affected their lives. Do they feel happy when they use it? Which social media
do they use more frequently? Besides, do undergraduate students spend less time
on the social media? Finally, are the Texans more in favor of the government
control of the personal privacy in social media than other groups are? To
investigate this answer, two classes worked together to make up a survey. We
had an agreement that each person should ask 6 American males, 6 American
females, and other groups such as international students, and so on. These
people should be in the Tech community. Our survey process was restricted to
the busy people and we didn’t spend money to ask students to do it. The busy
people may not be represented since they were in hurry and may not have had
enough time to read through and think about the questions in the survey. The
process was that we went to somewhere like student union building, library or
other places to ask for 12 people who wanted to do the survey for us.
The survey included four parts:
demographic questions, social media, parental leave, and Black Lives Matter. In
the demographic section, we asked five questions to investigate the gender,
age, birthplace, and whether our respondents were undergraduate or graduate as
well as whether they had children. In the social media section, it had eighteen
questions. Among them, five of questions which are tailored to my interests.
All the questions of the survey were well designed; therefore, it provided rich
information we needed and matched with what I wanted to know.
In my opinion, this survey was being
done in a right way, since we asked questions in a simple and direct way so
that our respondents could easily understand the meaning of questions.
Our respondents were
roughly half female and half male, and around 70% of them were undergraduate
while the remaining 30% were the graduate. As the demographic part,
approximately 65% of total participants were from Texas, 20% of them were from
other states of US, and 15% of them were from other countries. The age of most
respondents was around 18 to 22 years old and just a few of them had children.
Overall, it was representative in terms of gender, but we did not consider
other factors, for example, the race, economic status, major, and so on. Since
we are out of time and funding, it is impossible for us to investigate all
other factors that are not shown in the survey. One thing to keep in mind is
that again we didn’t want to be data analysts to analyze the whole population
of students in the Tech community, but we wanted to learn their conceptions of
different issues.
Results
Results
I believed that female students would
spend more time on the social media than male students do because female
students claim that they use social media to find a company while they feel
lonely or bored. In fact, we found that this hypothesis is true. Female
students spend more time on the social media and this funding shows that they
use social media more often than male students do. The data we collected can
support this hypothesis. Here, we define the longer time as more than two
hours. According to our data, 62% of female students use social media more than
two hours a day while only 41% of male students use social media more than two
hours a day. This can be solid evidence to verify my hypothesis. This finding
is important since we can not only compare whether which group spends more time
on social media but also understand the habits of our young generation. Besides
the time, we also analyze which social media application male or female like
most. Based on our data, both the number of female and male groups who use
Facebook is greater than others using different social media. One thing we must
be careful is that although most of people in these two groups use Facebook but
the ratio of each group is not over 50%. Thus, we may not conclude that Facebook
is the most popular social media among female and male groups.
I believe that our participants would
claim that they think social media brings them a positive impact on their
social life. If they claim so, it would make them feel happy since the positive
impact on their social life always plays an import role in the emotions. If
not, they may feel depressed or upset. In reality, we found that most of the
respondents are say that they think social media has a positive impact on their
social life. Around 49% of respondents say that they think social media has a
positive impact on their social life while just 15% respondents say that it’s
negative to their social life. This number is close to the half of the
respondents but it’s what I expect. In brief, this hypothesis is right. This
result is obvious simply because if using the social media cannot bring you a
positive impact or make you happy in your life, you won’t want to use them.
Thus, this conclusion can be applied to any person.
I
believe that Facebook is most popular among our participants and I speculate
that over 50% of our participants would agree. In fact, according to our
surveys, Facebook might not be the most popular among our participants. The
data shows that 40% of participants like using Facebook, 25% of them like using
Instagram, 18% of them like using others, and 17% of them like using another
social media. Strictly speaking, this hypothesis is not totally right because
the ratio of like using Facebook is lower than expected. I fail to consider the
diversity of social media since I make this assumption based on my experience.
People use different social media for different purposes. For example, if this
person is work oriented, he would probably use Linkedin.
I
believe that the undergraduate respondents would report spending more time on
the social media than the graduate students do. In fact, we found that this
hypothesis is true. Approximately 56% of undergraduate respondents claim that
they use social media more than two hours a day while 46% of graduate
respondents say that they use social media more than two hours a day. Another
interesting difference between undergraduate student and graduate student is
that over 50% of undergraduate students claim that social media can be helpful
for better studies while less than 50% of graduate students say that it helps
their learning. This result is interesting because it reflects different ways
of thinking between these two groups. The detail would be discussed in the next
section. Apart from the difference between undergraduate and graduate students,
there are similar points with these groups. For example, we found that both
groups report that their passion for using social media is checking the news.
For over half of numbers in both groups claim that they like reading news when
using social media applications.
I believe that our participants that
are originally from Texas would be less in favor of government control of the
personal privacy in social media than other Americans from other states do. In
fact, we found that it is a partially right. Approximately 30% of Texans
participants claim that government does not need to take actions to protect
personal privacy in social media while 29% of them say yes. Although the number
of Texans responds who are less in favor of government help is larger than
Texans who say yes to government help, there are still 41% of them remain not
sure or it depends on. For the participants from other states, the data are as
following. 40% of Non-Texans respondents claim they want the government to
protect their privacy in social media, 22% of them said they don’t want to, and
38% of them remains " It depends". Comparing Texans with non-Texans
respondents, we can find that Texans respondents are less likely to want the
government control on this issue. Since I am a foreigner, the information I get
is from other people who have been in Texas. They may be right or wrong. One of the things I heard from others most is
that Texans tend to be conservative, and want the government to leave their
business alone. For this issue, obviously, the typical type of Texans cannot be
applied here. The possible reason is that they might be open to this issue.
I was especially interested in question
18 on the social media section. The question is "How do you respond to
conflicts in social media". Comparing Texans group with non-Texans group,
we found that over 60% of these two groups claim that they avoid the conflicts.
Besides, we also found that undergraduate and graduate students tend to avoid
the conflicts in social media. More than half people in both groups claim this
answer.
We also found another interesting fact
that undergraduate students tend to use social media during the class for
non-class purpose, while graduate students tend to try to avoid it. Over 50% of
undergraduate students use social media during the class whether they think
it’s ok or bad. However, while for graduate students, more than half claim that
they try to use social media during the class. This finding is important
because it reflects more mature learning attitude toward the class.
Discussion
Female students spend more time on
social media than male students do. This finding can show the habits of using
social media between two genders. Male students tend to use social media to
connect with old friends from time to time, while female students prefer to
chat with their friends through the social media and when they feel lonely,
they tend to find the company on the social media. Naturally, this result can
be expected. Among our participants, 40% of them claims that they use it
regularly. This figure is not as high as our expected. The major reasons are
that there are many different social media with diverse features. Our
participants may use them for many purposes. Facebook is for social networking,
Linkedin is for job searching, and so on.
Social
media brings lots of advantages to their life, for example, most of our
participants claim that it helps a lot in their social networking. It is
difficult for them not to use the social media for a single day. Therefore, in
our young generation, social media has played an irreplaceable role in their
life.
Another issue we want to discuss is the
difference between undergraduate students and graduate students. Overall,
undergraduate students spend more time on the social media than graduate
students do. This result is important because it gives us insight behind this
data. First, we can think about what makes these two results big difference.
From my personal experience, when I was an undergraduate student, I usually had
a plenty of time to learn other things, develop my interests, hang on with my
friends or do something I like except for the midterm and final. Now, I am a
graduate student. In my study, I need to read lots of papers, design and do
some experiments, after that, I must interpret the data, and make a PowerPoint
for presentation to my advisor. Besides, courses become more difficult than the
undergraduate level courses and lecturers give graduate students more home
works, projects, and exams. Most of the time are spent on the academy. I just
have little time using social media when I go home.
Another difference is that graduate students
tend to think that social media cannot help their studying while undergraduate
think opposite way. The reason is that graduate students tend to concentrate
their studying more since it requires lots of time and efforts to understand
the concepts and knowledge. In the other hand, the studying material for
undergraduate is easier and in which it does not require lots of time, so they
have time to use social media during studying. They claim that this result is
because they can use social media for few minutes as the rest which can improve
their efficiency of studying. For the similar point, the both groups are like
checking the news through the social media. It is a usual phenomenon. Nowadays,
fewer and fewer young people watched the news on TV. Most of them, when they
check on Facebook, they may read some news shown on the post. Besides, we also
find an interesting result. Graduate students try to avoid using social media
during class while undergraduate students use it during the class. This results
can reflect difference attitude of two groups. Graduate students, they
concentrate more on the class and be more serious on their studying while
undergraduate students just want to use it to kill the time during the class
and sometimes they may even lose their focus on the class because they may
think the material is boring or not interesting.
Finally,
I would like to discuss the Texans and non-Texans’ conceptions about the
government control of the personal privacy in social media. It is believed that
Texans do not want their government to interrupt their business. In this case,
some of them tend to want the government to protect their privacy in the social
media and some of them do not want the government help. Still, lots of people
remain not sure or it depends on. I think this issue is not related to the
money but related to the personal thought about this. Thus, different people
has different opinions toward this issue. Non-Texans show the same result. This
result is involved the personal issue so it may cause diverse results. Both
Texans or non-Texans groups claim that they avoid conflicts in social media.
This result shows that most of our respondents are the
peacemaker
and they don’t want the fight with others on the social media though it is anonymous.
Graduate and undergraduate students also show the same results.
There
are lots of limitations in this study. First, we just have around 296 samples
which are not enough to be representative. If we have time and funding, we are
a willingness to do 1000 samples or even 3000 samples. Besides, since we ask
people to do the survey randomly, we fail to consider the number of responds
for a different department. What we can do the next time is that we can ask 200
responds for each department so that it would be more convincing. Second, we
heard that many respondents complained that the survey is too long. I suggest
that we do not make four sections in the same survey; instead, we should do it
separately. In this way, responds won’t spend lots of time reading and filling
in the survey. Finally, I think the format of the survey is not good because it
was too crowded and there was little space between questions. Next time when we
need design the survey, this factor should also be considered. In my opinion,
we can ask some designers to design typesetting to make our survey more
readable and clear. Third, I think that our survey should be more logical and
consistent, and have certain relations between questions. Our survey seems a
little bit random since everyone writes various issues even on the same topics.
It would be better that we fix the issue on the same topics so that we can have
more solid and concrete study. Finally, if our respondents are restricted to
the Texas Tech Community, I think that faculty in the Texas Tech University
should also play an important role in the community. Without these faculty, the
school would lose its functions. As a result, to make our survey more
compelling and more representative, both students and faculty should be
included in our study. Other suggestion I would make is that since our
classmates are from different departments, they can ask students who also from
those different departments to fill in the survey. In this way, we could have
avoided having too many engineers. If no one is from that department, we need
to cooperate with each other to get the job done, but it would not have been
easy to be truly representative.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we found what we wanted
and what we interested in based on the results of the survey. We found that the
difference using habits on social media between male and female. Besides, we
also found that the difference between undergraduate and graduate students on
the social media issue. Lastly, we knew that Texans and Non-Texans’ conceptions
about the privacy on the social media are similar and they all supported
government control of the privacy on the social media. Although this survey may
not be perfect, we had tried our best to do it. This survey is useful because
we can know the conceptions of young generations about the social media issues
especially for social scientists and educator in the Texas Tech University.
Although this survey may still have had its drawbacks, we tried our best to
make it better and make it interesting. With this experience, next time, I
think that we could think a better way to get a solid and convincing results.
This research work is interesting to
me. From collecting the data to write a whole research paper, each step is
challenging for me. From these steps, I not only learned how to write a good
research paper but also learned how to communicate with American Students. In
brief, it was a good experience to me.
Bibliography
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Appendix
Survey Link
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