Study
of the perceptions of Texas Tech University’s Community on Social Media
Tianyu
Chen
11/30/2016
Abstract
This
paper explores the perceptions of people from Texas Tech University (TTU)’s
community about social media. A survey research consisting of Social Media,
Parental Leave and the Black Lives Matter Movement was conducted, among which
we analyzed 18 questions related to social media. We collected a total of 294
surveys. Some hypotheses were confirmed by survey results while some were not. Our
project could be beneficial for people to understand what the Texas Tech
community thought on social media. We found out the major purpose of TTU people
using social media was news review. We noticed that functions from social
media, such as re-posting and ‘likes’, would have an impact on TTU people’s
minds. Meanwhile, the TTU community cared about online privacy issue and
expected control from government. It is interesting that TTU people showed
morality when involved in online conflicts. Although we completed the project, we
believed that it still had a lot of places to improve.
Introduction
The emergence and prevalence of social
media across the world have changed people’s lives a lot with time. Twelve
years ago, when Facebook was alive online, many people were utterly ignorant of
what social media was. It is social media which swept the world by storm and
makes itself become one of the influential social platforms for human beings
that no one could easily ignore. Social media allow individuals to interact in
forms of blog posting, picture sharing, video exchanging and online activity participating.
Nowadays there are around 2.34 billion active users on social media worldwide
(eMarketer, 2016), including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and so on.
As Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other
social media platforms become more popular in the modern time, people’s lives
are integrated more than ever. And social media becomes an important part of socializing
for many Americans. We, groups in Academic Writing 5315, made a joint effort to
study Texas Tech University community’s perceptions of social media by doing a
survey. Texas Tech has 33,127 students (Cook, 2016), of whom most come from
Texas and other parts of the U.S. However, for graduate school, there are more
international students, who provide diversity.
We are interested in topics related to what
the TTU community thinks about social media. We also wanted to find out how
social media affects the TTU community. We also wanted to investigate the differences
such as gender, age, and educational background involved in affecting one’s
opinion. In this paper, I am especially focused on some specific topics. First,
how does social media change TTU students’ lives? Second, what kind of benefits
do TTU students get from using social media? Third, for TTU students, is there
any issue caused by using social media? What are their reflections with these
issues?
Literature review
Social media are everywhere. Indeed,
Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn collectively have billions of
users, and they’re getting bigger and more important each year (Bennett, 2013).
Social media are influencing students’ lives. One author (Abhishek, 2015)
mentioned that social media remove barriers of communication for students. He
agreed that each post on social media would mostly affect students’ mood and
make them become conscious of their own looks. Thus, personally, I want to find
out how social media affect TTU community’s life.
S. Bennett (2013) says that social media
affect users’ lives offline. People are more likely to do things offline
including sports attendance, dating, workout, purchase and political comment.
Parrack holds a similar opinion (2012), and he thought social networking sites
could help people make and keep friends. On the other side, social media can
help people recall previous memories. Kelley (Cornell University, 2016) talks
about how social media can be functioned to facilitate human memory when they
provide users previous posts and pictures to remind them what was happening at
that time.
Social media has a positive influence on
teenager’s minds. The fact (East, 2016) that inspires teenagers to use social
media more often is that part of the brain’s reward circuitry gets active when
they see a large number of likes for their photos. Squier (2016) mentioned that
people have always needed approval because human beings are social creatures,
and thus, fitting in and being part of The Group, is written into our DNA – we
need others to survive. And Dunn (Dunn, 2011) thinks social media has a
positive effect. He said instant feedback from social media benefits students
and can provide confidence to them.
However, social media result in some
negative effects. Firstly, social networks are massively addictive (Elgan,
2015). Elgan declared that most social network companies are trying to make
social media so addictive that people can't resist them. He also mentioned a
solution to kick addiction in which you visit social media once per day and
track the time. Second, young people can be negatively affected by social media
(Ali, 2015), especially when the post contains violence and sex, which can
damage their behavior.
Meanwhile, social media will cause a
social issue. An author (Abhishek, 2015) pointed out that socializing leads to
identity crisis, and he hopes for more control on social media sites. Llube
(2013) suggested that people should have an awareness to protect personal
information. Wayne (2016) insisted that violence from social media would bring
trauma to users. Besides, people are involved in conflicts online when using
social media. A new survey (Dziemianowicz, 2016) revealed that half of employed
dads are more likely to roil a social media platform in terms of posting
disputed opinions, compared to working moms.
Moreover, social media are beneficial to
business. For example, according to the article (Agnihotri, et al., 2016),
social media create a positive idea to the customer to buy business-to-business
(B2B) product, which describes that one business makes a commercial transaction
with another. For firms, social media is a good tool to build reputation in
public (Kietzmann, et al., 2011). And Holmes (Holmes, 2015) implies that
businesses can’t survive without social media. He insists investing in a social
strategy now is the single best way to the future.
Hypotheses
1.
TTU undergraduate students are more likely than graduate students to report
using social media to make friends.
Graduate students are busier. It’s their
responsibility to pay more attention to research assistance work or teaching
assistance work. However, undergraduate students are in a looser condition.
They have more time and options to surf online. Besides, when undergraduate
students left high school and stepped into college life, they needed more
friends in the situation where most childhood friends were going their
different ways. Those are the reasons that contribute for Hypothesis 1.
2.
TTU females are more likely to report recalling memories when using social
media.
The study (Cornell University, 2016)
mentioned that social media could facilitate human memories, and thus, I
suppose TTU students would agree that media can help them to recall memories. I
think females, with delicate emotions, are more perceptual than male. It’s easy
to arise female’s attention to recall things when social media show some posted
pictures or blogs. Hence, I believe that TTU females will report remembering
better when using social media.
3.
Feedback from followers through social media satisfies more TTU undergraduate
students than graduate students.
East (2016) talked about how when they
got “like” for their posts online, that prompted teenagers to get stuck in
social media increasingly. It’s easy to understand that what young people want
most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of others. Herein, it’s
reasonable to suppose that TTU students would earn satisfaction from whoever is
following them, commenting on posts and clicking on “like”. Nevertheless,
graduate students differ from undergraduates in that they are more mature. They
mostly have a broader sight towards definition of self-satisfaction. For
example, they would like to make efforts in the academic field to satisfy
themselves. That’s the reason behind hypothesis 3.
4.
Most TTU students will think personal privacy is threatened when they use
social media, especially graduate ones.
Abhishek (2015) and Llube (2013)
mentioned the threat of individual information theft. With prosperity in online
socializing and online trading, people should be aware of the risk of security
of personal information. Thus, there is reasonable ground to believe most of
TTU students have realized the situation that personal digital information is
at a risk. Graduate students, especially, value this problem. Most of them
employed as teaching assistants officially have Social Security Numbers, which
are related to personal credit score. Obviously, identity theft will have a
negative effect on graduate students’ credit records.
5.
Most TTU female students are willing to avoid conflicts when socializing
online.
Personally, males are naturally overt
when they feel anger and act it out physically. Based upon a survey
(Dziemianowicz, 2016), working moms show brilliance in dealing with these
cases. They make efforts in navigating the conflicts. Therefore, I make an
assumption that female students in TTU majoring in engineering are willing to
avoid online battle.
Method
To verify our hypotheses, a survey was
conducted with the aim of investigating the real perceptions about social media
and finding out the correlations with different issues. We had an agreement
that each person had to collect at least 13 surveys, 6 American males, 6
American females and 1, themselves. Other survey participants in the TTU
community (student, faculty, or staff) were also welcome to fill out more
surveys. We have two classes, which consisted of one instructor, two TAs and 20
students. We determined to discard uncompleted and improper survey sheets. We
did not put any control on what kind of people our group asked except in gender.
And we agreed to randomly find qualified participants around the TTU campus.
Our main goal was to have an equal number of male and female participants to
study the TTU community’s perception. Thus, we estimated we would collect
around 150 males and 150 female surveys, which were far from representative of
up to 35,000 persons on the TTU campus, but it can reflect perceptions of TTU
community to some extent.
The survey contained 36 questions
covering three topics, Social Media, Parental Leave and the Black Lives Matter
Movement, and 5 questions associated with demographic background. All the
questions were single-answer questions. We agreed that most survey question
choices had forms of ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, ‘Often’ or ‘Frequently’, ‘Agree’ or ‘Disagree’.
Choices of ‘N/A’, ‘Not Sure’, ‘Depends’ and ‘Sometimes’ were designed for those
choice-pendulums when people were uncertain how they could decide. For some
particular questions, given choices were provided to help guide respondents to
understand how they should answer. For example, we listed several nouns or
opinions to let participants make a choice of which one best fit their
thoughts.
Personally, I emphasized topics related
to influence of social media on the TTU community. With the aim of finding out
the difference between undergraduates and graduates while using social media,
we raised questions to verify whether educational background affects the main
purpose of using social media. Social media sometimes provides a function which
was designed to help users recall things. I was interested in figuring out if
participants thought it worked. We could verify relationships between genders
and effectiveness of this memory-recall function when analyzing questions along
with demographic questions. I hypothesized that built-in functions such as
‘likes’ would bring an impact on people’s mood. In this case, we could conclude
by figuring out the ratio of people who admitted that the gain of ‘likes’ or
lack of them would alter their feelings and people who didn’t. Moreover, most
of us cared about the TTU community’s opinions towards security issues in
social media. Multi-line analysis including questions of worries and official
control were helpful to understand participants’ minds. Conflicts resulting from
freedom of social media was another issue for me to be concerned about. It’s
meaningful to count how many people would like to stir it up when they were
involved in online conflicts.
The methods involved in survey data
collection were aimed at collecting information from each sample in a
systematic way. Here, we use Google Sheets to combine all the data. Gathered data were analyzed and plotted
respectively by each person in our group.
Results
To investigate their perceptions towards
Social Media, Parental Leave and Black Lives Matter, we collected a total
number of 294 surveys from TTU community, of which 28% were graduate students,
67% were undergraduate students and 5% were faculty or staff (as shown in Fig.
1). Our results show that the percentages of male and female participants were
51% and 49%, respectively. This showed that our data was representative of the TTU
community in male/female ways to some extent. Both participants were kindly to
join our survey. Only a small portion of them were not able to fill out survey
due to time schedule.
First, I believed that TTU undergraduate
students are more likely to use social media to make friends other than
graduate students. Results of the survey showed this hypothesis was right.
Compared with graduates, undergraduates were more inclined to use social media
to make new friends. Our results showed that 20% of undergraduates were using
social media with the aim of making friends, while only 13% of graduates were
doing that. It’s interesting to find out that both graduate females and
undergraduate females took up a large proportion, while males were limited when
using social media to make friends. However, the main purpose for the TTU community
to use social media was reading news, instead of associating with others. As
shown in Fig. 2, more than half of the TTU community favored in checking what
happened daily when they logged in to social software. 57% of graduates and 56%
of undergraduates chose this option, of which males occupied 62% and 58%,
respectively.
Next, I made a hypothesis that TTU
females would do better in recalling memories when socializing online. That
hypothesis was partially true. We found that most of both females and males on
TTU campus hold the same opinion that they could remember previous things
easily when social media posted old pictures and events. The percentage of TTU males who agreed they
could easily recall things was 68%, which is a little bit lower than that of
TTU females. More than 82% of females on campus agreed with that. This result
was different when we asked participants their fondness of this recall
function. Two thirds of TTU females held the opinion that they liked this
function. However, in the case of TTU males, the numbers of supporters and opponents
were neck and neck, where the ratio of supporters and opponents was 1.1.
I considered that the ‘likes’ function
had a larger possibility to alter undergraduates’ mood rather than graduates.
However, it was not valid. The results showed that TTU undergraduates were
quiet enough inside when they gained or lacked ‘likes’. More than 61%
undergraduates claimed that there was no influence with the number of ‘likes’.
Only 40% of TTU graduates agreed that such feedback had no impact on them; that
is less than the percentage of undergraduates. What’s more, we found most of
the TTU community committed that ‘likes’ and facial expressions changed their
habits of online interaction. There were only 16% of TTU graduates and 21% of
undergraduates who confirmed that they would not use these simple kinds of
feedback rather than detailed comments to communicate online.
We also assumed that personal privacy
issue throughout social media had become a consensus of the TTU community on
campus. The results supported this view. It implied that the TTU community
worried about the online privacy issue, especially TTU graduates. Only one
third of undergraduates were not concerned about the issue of personal security
when using social media. And graduates occupied a much smaller percentage, 18%
out of the total. When it came to governmental control, most participants
believed that complimentary control of online personal security was expected at
some stages. The opponents of government control were only 23% and 28%,
respectively for graduates and undergraduates.
I supposed that TTU females and males
would have different attitudes towards conflicts when they were using social
media. That has been proved wrong by results. As shown in Fig. 3, TTU females
and males had a similar tendency when facing online conflicts. Around 70% of
TTU males would like to avoid conflicts, similarly to TTU females, while
roughly 10% of TTU females and males favored stirring them up. The rest of the
participants, around 20% of the total, mentioned that they would like to do
something for peace. What’s more, no faculty or staff on the TTU campus showed
an attempt to intensify such an ‘online battle’. Every one of them would choose
to contribute to working for peace.
Discussion
With the aim to find out the perceptions
of Texas Tech community about Social Media, we conducted a survey of a total of
294 participants on TTU campus. Our final goal was to conduct a survey that
would be mostly representative of the TTU community. In this case, we managed
to achieve this goal by choosing participants based on gender and nationality.
Our survey had a limitation that it was not able to represent opinions from the
whole TTU community because we have a huge number of people on campus, around
35,000 people. Despite this limitation, our survey could tell what the TTU
community thought about Social Media to some extent. Our survey could help us
better understand how Social Media had an influence on the TTU community, and
it also revealed benefits gained and issues raised at the same time. Given more
resources including funding and students, the collecting of data could be
representative enough when we have fair distribution of participants with
respect to profession, age, nationality and so on. In the future, we could
design a more convincing and rigorous survey to find out the TTU community’s
view about Social Media. Representative results that we obtained this time
could be verified next time.
Firstly, we hypothesized that more TTU
undergraduate students would be more likely than graduates to use social media
with the aim of making friends. Survey Results confirmed this hypothesis.
Generally, undergraduates who are young and energetic have more free time to
socialize online with others. Most of them have the situation that they are
leaving high school and childhood friends, which pushes them to make more
acquaintances. However, graduate students are busy. They would like to pay more
attention to research. Therefore, we found out the same trend from the TTU
community. Meanwhile, the major purpose of using social media was not online
socializing, it was reading news. The results showed the potential in
journalism that social media has. Social media provides a platform for people
interacting with others in an easy and efficient way. More detailed information
could be collected if we divided the option ‘making friends’ into ‘making new
friends’ and ‘connecting with old friends’ when we designed the survey.
In the second hypothesis, we believed
social media was more helpful for TTU females than males to recall memories.
The results showed this hypothesis was valid, because females considered the
recollection of memories more helpful than males do. Basically, females who
have a delicate mind and sensitive emotion claimed they were more likely to
think back when they saw old things. Survey data showed agreement with the hypothesis,
that TTU females did better in reviewing memories when socializing online.
Besides, the results of the TTU community’s fondness for this recall function
from social media accorded with previous one. Most TTU females confirmed that
they liked this function; however, only half of TTU males said yes. It did not
surprise us because memories provoke emotions and men are less comfortable with
that experience. To be more accurate, we can investigate the attitudes towards
the recall function with respect to their age, because elder people show more
interest in memories generally. Further study would help to analyze how grades
of age affect the opinions of remembering things when using social media.
Thirdly, we assumed that mood of
undergraduates was easier to be influenced with the lack of ‘likes’ from social
media or not. The survey data denied this assumption. The results showed that
the younger they are, the more likely they will deny that “likes” influence
their mood. In case of undergraduates, it’s just out of a young person’s need
to feel control of their mind. Graduates, being more mature, are more likely to
accept the obvious, that, no matter how small, we like “likes”. This could be
tested by other ways young people answered other questions.
The fourth hypothesis stated that online
personal privacy had become a consensus issue among the TTU community. Our
survey results supported this view. Few graduates claimed they were not
concerned about this issue at all when using social media. Normalization of
online socializing, especially online transactions, force people to focus on
protection of personal information. Compared with undergraduates, graduate
students who are experienced and mature are more likely to pay attention on
online security. It’s surprising that the majority of TTU students expected the
government to take steps on control of online safety while fewer undergraduates
and graduates were against governmental control. That implied that most of the
TTU community regarded online personal privacy as physical property which
should have a legal guarantee. In this survey, 5% of the total 294 surveys were
filled out by TTU faculty/staff. With the aim to improve our survey, we can
find more TTU faculty/staff to be included in the future study.
In the last hypothesis, we believed
gender would have an impact on the TTU community’s attitudes towards conflicts
when they were using social media. This hypothesis turned out to be wrong.
Results showed that both TTU females and males behaved similarly if they were
involved in online conflicts. Thus, gender is not a main factor to explain why
most TTU community would like to avoid online conflicts. A plausible way to
explain the phenomenon is that online communication is largely relying on
individual perception and interpretation of others’ messages. When online
conflicts occur, it’s harder to resolve than conflicts in person. Thus,
individuals who lack patience, communication skill and anger management would
easily dispute on social media. To verify our conclusion, we can raise other
question such as character test in the future study if we can compare people’s
attitude towards online conflicts with that in person. Besides, all
participating TTU faculty/staff would contribute to working for peace. It’s
interesting that we didn’t find any faculty or staff on the TTU campus who would
admit to stirring up conflict, or even to avoiding it. We could make an
explanation that educators had the virtue of being polite online. However, we
didn’t get enough participating TTU faculty/staff to verify the representativeness,
because only 5% of our participants were TTU faculty/staff. In the future
survey, we can expect a promising distribution in regards to involving enough
teachers and staff on TTU campus.
Conclusions
In summary, we conducted a survey to investigate
perceptions about social media from the Texas Tech community. We found out that
participating undergraduates on TTU campus were more likely to regard social
media as a platform to make friends than graduates. It seems that young people
favor making friends online. However, most of participants confirmed that they
were using social media to check what happened around them. This result showed
that the major purpose for the TTU community using social media was checking
news. We also found gender affected TTU community’s view about the re-posting
function. It seems that re-posting function appealed to females more. Besides,
lack of ‘likes’ on social media would possibly cause a mood change for
graduates on TTU campus. It implied that maturity influenced TTU people’s
emotions when friends liked their posts online. We noticed that
privacy issue from social media had drawn wide attention on TTU community. Most
TTU participants agreed that governmental control was essential, and they
expected their privacy had legal protection when it comes to online personal
information security. Finally, we
discovered that both TTU males and females didn't like to be offensive when
they had conflicts online. No TTU faculty or staff would like to intensity
online conflict, which showed the morality of the TTU community. We hope that
these findings would help Texas Tech community to have a better understand of
opinions from other TTU people about social media.
Appendix A. Graphs
Fig.
1. Percentage of survey participants
Fig.
2. Purpose of using social media
Fig.
3. Options on online conflicts from female and male
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