Analysis of social media issues in the Texas Tech Community- ChengTa Cho

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 (Wallace, 2014) 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

        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

Davis, R. (2013, April 24). Social media use may lead to poor grades. The Brown Daily Herald. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/04/24/social-media-use-may-lead-to-poor-grades/

Dunn, J. (2011, July 11). The 10 best and worst ways social media impacts education. Edudemic. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://www.edudemic.com/social-media-education/

Erin, A. (2014, April 8). Can social media make you happier? Socialnomics Blog. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://socialnomics.net/2014/04/08/can-social-media-make-you-happier/

Karadkar, A. (2015, September 13). The impact of social media on student life. Technician. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from     http://www.technicianonline.com/opinion/article_d1142b70-5a92-11e5-86b4-cb7c98a6e45f.html

Leopold, T. (2015, May 1). Can social media make you happy? CNN. Retrieved September29, 2016, from http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/01/living/feat-happiness-social-media/

Park, A. (2014, March 12). This is how you spread your emotions on Facebook. Time. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://time.com/21901/being-on-facebook-can-actually-make-us-happier/

Probst, C. (2015, August 31). 10 ways social media affects mental health. Degreed Blog. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://blog.degreed.com/10-ways-social-media-affects-our-mental-health/

Schill, R. (2011, August 24). Social networking teens more likely to drink or use drugs, study finds. Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://jjie.org/teens-on-facebook-more-likely-drink-or-use-drugs-study-finds/20713/

Udorie, J. E. (2015, September 16). Social media is harming the mental health of teenagers. Theguardian. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/16/social-media-mental-health-teenagers-government-pshe-lessons

  Wallace, K. (2014, October 7). The upside of selfies: Social media isn't all bad for kids. CNN. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/21/living/social-media-positives-teens-parents/

Whiteman, H. (2015, June 10). Social media: How does it affect our mental health and well-being? Medicalnewstoday. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/275361.php?page=2

   Widdowson, M. (2016, May 3). Is social media making people depressed? World Economic Forum. Retrieved September 29, 2016, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/is-social-media-making-people-depressed

Appendix

Survey Link

Research on Testing Tech’s Students’ Perceptions of Parental Leave_____by Jin

 Research on Testing Tech’s Students’ Perceptions of Parental Leave

Jin Hao

Dec.6th 2016

Abstract

The paper is aimed to test Texas Tech’s students’ perceptions of parental leave. Firstly, a thorough literature review including 15 news articles was made for us to obtain the basic perception of low parental leave coverage in the United States now. Secondly, based on the literature review, five hypotheses of different angles were made to compare with students’ potential reactions. Then a questionnaire was made by ourselves, allocated to students in Tech and combined together for analysis in the end. According to the data of our survey, basic judgements on five hypotheses towards Tech students’ perceptions was made, which were different to the author’s predictions. The paper also discusses possible reasons for the difference and proposes some revising advice for the questionnaire.

Keywords: perceptions; parental leave

Introduction

        In recent years, there has been much debate over the parental leave in United States. As a group of students together researching on the parental leave now, we are interested in the TTU students’ perceptions of parental leave in the United States. From the beginning, several definitions of parental leave of different stages should be clarified to be the basis of further discussion. To be specific, parental leave is an employee’s welfare which consists of maternal leave, paternal leave and even adoptive leave. Maternity leave is used to describe a particular period that a mother could be absent from work to take care of her child for some reasons, for example, breastfeeding or soothing. Similarly, paternal leave is used to define the same particular period for a father. Though mothers are considered to put more emphasis on the family issues conventionally, fathers are being influenced by both the importance of men in family education and the equality of genders these days. In this case, fathers have become more aware of the right they should have on family issues and now many countries provide the right called paternal leave for that reason.

        However, in the United States, the country with traditional low degree of motivation to interfere with economic issues, there are few parents covered by parental leave currently. Even unpaid parental leave is hard to find. From the other countries’ experience, we know that men play as important a role as women on prompting parental leave. Thus, I am also interested in the people’s perception of men’s attitude towards parental leave in Texas Tech University and tried to make several hypotheses of people’s perception based on the intense literature review and following survey results later.

Literature Review and Hypothesis

        The United States is one of the developed countries which possesses a extremely low coverage of parental leave and the only developed country which doesn’t provide governmental mandated maternal leave, according to Wojcicki (2016). Due to the highly competitive environment having lasted for a long time, it is believed that real changes can only happen when federal governments make laws to enforce states and companies to obey, according to both Wojcicki (2016) and Starner (2016). According to the literature review above, I think it is reasonable to make the following hypothesis: most students would believe that the coverage of parental leave becomes stagnant unless federal governments interfere with the parental leave issue.

        For most employers unaccustomed to parental leave, it would be harder for women with children to get employed by them. Mr. Henderson (2016) mentioned that that the economic pressure of parental leave would be borne both by people who take advantage of it, and even also by people who do not. What’s more, he concluded that the only way in which the extended parental leave would not hurt employees is if it is largely supported by much wealthier tax payers. In addition, there is no doubt that parental leave is necessary for parents, since the vulnerability of infants really matters and they couldn’t always rely on private institutes’ service, according to May (2016). According to the literature review above, I think it is reasonable to make the following hypothesis: most students would believe that the parental leave itself is necessary for parents.

        Even though parental leave is provided, employers would try to let their employees take the leave to the least extent by proposing particular policies, which could create a recessive discrimination on those who take full parental leaves in the end. As Dearborn (2016) said taking parental leave leads mothers to be cut off from important projects, promotions and raises. Moreover, Mayer (2016) mentioned that the result of a survey in which 36% of men would not take parental leave since they thought taking parental leave could be seen as a sign of a lack of commitment. In this case, nearly all parents need to process an inevitable trade-off between holidays and stereotype before they make the final decision. According to the literature review above, I think it is reasonable to make the following hypothesis: most students would believe that the widely recessive discrimination on employees who take full parental leaves is the main reason that would cause them to hesitate when it was available for them to take full parental leave.

        However, there are still some employers giving prefect examples to employees and also other fellows for promoting the parental leave. For instance, Garcia (2016) mentioned that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg took a parental leave of about two months, which exceeded that of most of the parents in America. In other words, bosses taking parental leave is one of the keys to supporting parental leave substantially. In addition, many high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Adobe and Netfix, provide fully paid parental leave, according to Greenburg (2015). Those companies regard the policy of paid parental leave as an attraction for both current and prospective qualified employees. Finally, they would gain better long-run outcomes in terms of direct profit and human resources. Tech companies always change the way of people’s lives, as they do while promoting parental leave. As Peck (2015) mentioned, some banking companies planned to extend the length of paid maternal leave since they have to compete with tech companies at all rounds. In the end, there could be more companies offering better quality parental leave. According to the literature review above, I think it is reasonable to make the following hypothesis: most students would believe that whether a company provides parental leave becomes an important issue when one is comparing several offers in hand.

        As Bluethmann (2016) said, most men take much less or even no paternal leave, since they are quite largely influenced by the stereotype of male shaped by their companies and the society. A lot of people ignore the importance of paternal leave, even the electorate of an American president. As Bethell (2016) mentioned, Donald Trump announced a proposal of six weeks parental leave but it didn’t cover the needs of fathers at all. However, as time passes by, more fathers have become aware of that their care for their child is important to their wives. And some companies have begun to make parental leave neutral of genders and provided parental leave tot fathers as well, according to Pinsker (2016). According to the literature review above, I think it is reasonable to make the following hypothesis: most students would believe that fatherhood plays an important role in raising infants and men’s awareness of their equal rights helps promoting both maternal leave and paternal leave; thus, they will say that paternal leave should be improved in the future as well.

Method Section

        We aimed to analyze the perception of people in Texas Tech University of several different social issues, including social media, parental leave and Black Lives Matter. Thus we designed a corresponding questionnaire and collected data after giving out and circulating questionnaires on campus. I was especially interested in people’s perception of men’s attitude towards parental leave; thus I designed the eighth and ninth questions of the parental leave section.

        The two-page questionnaire used for the survey consisted of detailed demographic questions of age, gender, educational level, hometown and family status, and three sections corresponding to these three separate social issues we were collectively interested in. 18 questions were prepared for measuring people’s perception of social media on the first page, nine questions were for parental leave, and another nine were for Black Lives Matter, both on the second page. Most questions required volunteers to choose a single scale representing their perception of social issues. The characteristic of easy reading and writing could balance for the big volume of the questionnaire.

        For the data collecting, we made an agreement that each student of our class took 13 questionnaires at the beginning. Among the questionnaires, six were for men, six were for women and the last one was for he or she to complete himself or herself. On one morning I gave out mine at different places, including my department, the engineering center, the chemistry building, the SUB, and the library. Most people were willing to help me as long as I explained clearly about the process and chose the people that were not busy. What surprised me was that they were all interested in these social topics selected. In the end, I got only five refusals, and exactly 12 surveys of exact equal sex ratio. All surveys were valid since my volunteers completed all questions perfectly.

        For two classes of academic writing, there were 294 people (students, faculty and staff) from Texas Tech University volunteering to participate in the survey, including 149 men and 144 women, ranging in age from 18 to over 29 years old. The ratio of sex was kept almost balanced. Data of uncompleted surveys were eliminated automatically to ensure the validity. However, we still could not make sure that volunteers were exactly randomly selected from the whole population in Texas Tech University, due to our limited time and funding. We have to admit that rather than doing a scientific research on social issues, experiencing the writing process was our major concern.

Result Section

        Having collected all the data from our 289 valid questionnaires of parental leave, now I am able to judge my previous hypotheses based on people’s perceptions. Firstly, we could not simply speculate that most students would believe the coverage of parental leave would become stagnant unless federal governments interfere with the parental leave’s issue, as which was stated in my literature review and hypothesis part posted at the beginning. The first question of the questionnaire is the one that could effectively test people’s perception for my first hypothesis. If one agrees that the government should make and mandate policy of parental leave, he or she tends to agree with my hypothesis. We could see that more than half of the volunteers chose ‘yes’. However, there is also a substantial portion of non-positive answers such as ‘no’ and ‘don’t know’. To be specific, 56% of people chose ‘yes’, 23% of people chose ‘don’t know’, while the remaining 21% of people chose ‘no’ according to the survey’s results. In my opinion, 56% could not be simply defined as ‘most’ so I wouldn’t derive the agreement with my first hypothesis directly.

        Secondly, we could partly reject the hypothesis that most students would believe recessive discrimination from boss and peer would hamper their motivation to take full parental leaves. The second question of the questionnaire asked people’s perception for that exactly. If one’s answer is ‘no’, he or she would be more inclined to admit the influence of recessive discrimination on making decisions. What’s more, people selecting ‘yes’ could also be sort of aware of the potential discrimination though they finally chose to do what they thought was good for babies under the scheme of their companies. In a word, we should not simply wipe out those people choosing ‘yes’ while estimating the perception of discrimination on taking parental leaves. Here we assume that people selecting ‘yes’ have overall less tendency to be aware of the discrimination than those selecting ‘no’ or ‘maybe’. According to the survey’s results, more people chose ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ rather than ‘no’. Actually there were only 14% of people answering ‘no’, 27% of people answering ‘maybe’ and the remaining of 59% of people answering ‘yes’.

        Thirdly, the hypothesis that most students would regard parental leave as an important bonus while choosing offers should be partly accepted. The third question of the questionnaire collected people’s perception of that. He or she would be in strong favor of my hypothesis as long as the answer is ‘yes’, and the answer of ‘maybe’ represents weaker support as well. From my perspective, people would not care about the existence of parental leave at all if they were strongly opposed to parental leave, or at least didn’t regard it as a vital welfare desired. In other words, it is reasonable for us to assume that the more positive his or her answer is, the more important parental leave is. According to the survey’s results, more people voted for ‘yes’ than ‘maybe’ and ‘no’, and the portion showing the strong favor exceeds the half. To be specific, 56% of people voted for ‘yes’, 25% of people voted for ‘maybe’ while the rest 19% of people voted for ‘no’.

         Then, we could not simply speculate that most students believe paternal leave should be improved in the future, which was presented in my literature review and hypothesis part posted at the beginning. The seventh question of the questionnaire asked volunteer to select an ideal scale representing the portion of paternal leave to maternal leave in the future. This question could clearly reveal people’s perception for what we should do towards paternal leave, since the assumed given length of maternal and paternal leave in the questionnaire are quite closed to what they are now, which I can assure is true after thorough literature review about the current condition of parental leave in the United States. In general, answers of ‘parental leave should be extended’ and ‘paternal leave should be equal to maternity leave’ show agreement with my hypothesis because the assumed proportion is twelve. In addition, more people chose ‘paternal leave should be extended’ and ‘paternal leave should be equal to maternal leave’ over other non-positive answers, according to the results. Actually, 61% of people voted for those two positive answers, and 25% of people opposed improving paternal leave, while the other 14% showed discernment or neutrality for this issue. In my opinion, 61% could not simply be defined as ‘most’, either.

        For my hypothesis testing people’s perception of the necessity of parental leave, we could regard it as kind of similar to the third hypothesis discussing the importance of parental leave. Thus, the second question of the questionnaire gives a direct instruction. Now we could analyze the perception even more simply. Those who answered ‘No’, don’t care about paid parental leave while choosing offers. They would show a negative attitude towards the necessity of parental leave as well. According to the survey’s results, more people voted for ‘yes’ than ‘maybe’ and ‘no’, and the portion showing negative attitude is small. To be specific, 56% of people voted for ‘yes’, 25% of people voted for ‘maybe’ while 19% of people voted for ‘no’. Similarly, we partly accept the hypothesis in the end.

        I still found some more valuable results other than those that could be directly linked to my hypothesis. From the result of the eighth question of the questionnaire, we could find that in general, men and women’s perception of unmarried men’s attitude towards parental leave are surprisingly closed to each other. For example, 39 women and 41 men chose ‘yes’ toward the question, seven women and eight men chose ‘no’, 46 women and 44 men chose ‘may be’, while 26 women and 26 men chose ‘don’t know’. In conclusion, based on the mutual perception, there would be 14% of single men choosing ‘yes’, 3% of single man choosing ‘no’, and 16% of single men choosing ‘may be’, while 9% of single men would choose ‘don’t know’ towards the question. In general, both groups of men and women present positive belief on single men’s perception of paid parental leave, since positive answers are more than negative ones. Moreover, when single men face the question, their collective response desires analyzing since it represents single men’s common sense towards the question directly. Nevertheless, we could not get the desired data of single men since we have no one choice showing their single status or not in the demographic part of the questionnaire, which could be improved for the next time to gather more deep conclusions.

        What’s more, if people chose a positive answer towards the first question, there is higher possibility for them to choose a positive answer towards the sixth question, compared with those choosing non-positive answer to the first question. In other words, these two questions show somehow similar interests inherently. Now to judge the attitude towards the sixth question, we would calculate the average number. The number ranges from one to five and the larger the number is, the more benefit parental leave would bring to us. According to the survey’s result, the response of those having chosen ‘yes’ for the first question to the sixth question is 3.9, the response of those having chosen ‘don’t know’ for the first question to the sixth question is 3.6, while the one of those having chosen ‘no’ is 2.8. These results show that there are some correlations of people’s perception of governmental-driven policy on parental leave and the outcome parental leave could bring to the whole society. The more they agree that government should make mandatory polices for parental leave, the more likely they consider parental leave beneficial.

Discussion Section

         Though many of my hypotheses could only be partially accepted or rejected, there are still lots of issues desiring further discussion. From the results we found that they showed overall a more positive attitude towards paid parental leave. Slightly more than half of people proposed governmental-driven policies, and believed in the benefits of paid parental leave. This is a bit different from my prediction of their perceptions, and there are three probable reasons to illustrate their overall perceptions here.

        Firstly, students are more inclined to be so-called idealists regarding social welfare issues, compared with elder people, according to my own experience. Definitely, almost everyone knows that the welfare, like paid parental leave, is better than nothing if no one needs to pay for it in the end. However, there must be some people paying for the welfare, which is a fact that couldn’t be rejected at all. Then things become totally different, even if you insist on supporting paid parental leave after knowing and admitting the fact. From my perspective, students are relatively lacking in social experience in general, so they tend to make things simpler than elder people especially when different stakeholders are included in the complex issue. In other words, students might care about the value most, though some of them admit that it would be utopian to pursue the value based on their social perceptions.

        Secondly, for the particular occasion when Texas joined the union and the solid foundation of conservative value, most residents in Texas tend to reject union governmental intervention. In addition, paid parental leave is partly a representative of governmental intervention in the United States, too. So I made the hypothesis that Tech students would show overall negative attitudes to parental leave. However, don’t neglect that there are still lots of students from outside Texas taking our survey. Though it is reasonable to speculate that they were attracted by Tech since they pleasantly accepted the prevalent conservative value in west Texas at the beginning, I don’t think value is the only criteria for students to choose a target university. They might consider financial or scholastic issues as well. For example, if a student plan to major in Petroleum Engineering, he or she might be strongly interested in Tech. If a student in poverty really desires undergraduate-level education and only Tech provides financial aids with him or her among different offers, he or she might come to Tech directly. In a word, Tech students outside Texas might agree or disagree with the conservative value here, since the basis of selecting target universities could be highly diversified, which makes Tech students respond quite differently to parental leave. Some people think that when students outside Texas are immersed in the conservative value in west Texas, they might be influenced more or less. I think that’s correct but the influence from non-Texas students to Texas students could occur as well. Thus we could not simply speculate that only students become conservative but no ones become liberal after several years study in Tech. Moreover, we could not label one Texas student as conservative or label one non-Texas student as liberal, since everyone is an individual though collective values exist.

        Finally, some students may benefit a lot from other social welfare proposed by governments at different stages, so they might show overall positive attitudes to similar policies driven by governments unconsciously.

        Moreover, we have to admit that the survey could be improved a lot in the future. In the first place, the process of collecting data could be designed to be more evenly distributed within the university. From my perspective, the distribution should consider different locations or time as well, besides just controlling for sex ratio. You might have the higher probability getting similar responses over a specific social issue if you receive questionnaires from only one place as opposed to different places. For example, you would find that students of social science are more likely to agree that paid parental leave is necessary, and you would find them more frequently if you choose to allocate your questionnaires just outside the building of social science in Texas Tech University. What’s more, we have to notice that even students without social experience could be current or potential stakeholders for a social issue too, which could affect their attitudes unconsciously.

        Secondly, the questionnaire itself could be further revised as well, since many questions don’t provide perfect direction to our hypotheses at all. At the beginning, every one of us had to make five hypotheses. Nevertheless, the size of the questionnaire was rather limited, and finally only two questions were uploaded. It is hard to make two questions cover all hypotheses made before. In addition, some questions need further explanation. For instance, the last question of parental leave initially was designed to test people’s perception of whether other groups of employees should be taken into consideration or not, other than pregnant women. However, it used ‘broaden the coverage’, which was quite vague. And the way it asks should be revised as well since there shouldn’t be an incompatible relationship between extending pregnant women’s length of paid parental leave and further care of other groups’ welfare at all. For the eighth question, we wanted to test the perception of unmarried men but we forgot to add the choices of marital status in the demographic part. The filter could provide us with great comparison of humans’ perceptions.

Conclusion

        According to the data of our survey, basic judgements on five hypotheses towards Tech students’ perceptions was made. Most of these judgements gave us the impression that more than half of Tech’s students tended to favor both maternal and paternal leave, admit parental leave’s necessity and benefits, and even support governmental-driven policies on parental leave issues. Nevertheless, the impression was quite different to what I thought they would like to be. To illustrate the difference, probably we have to consider the ordinary value hold by younger people on social welfare issues innately, the potential of their identity of stakeholder on social welfare issues and the diversified reasons of coming to Tech for study. Moreover, we shouldn’t neglect the huge potential of our questionnaire’s revising, which could influence our research. 

Appendix

Survey Link

Bibliography

Bethell, K. (2016, September 15).

What Trump’s parental leave policy is missing. CNN. Retrieved on Sept. 15, 2016, from http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/14/opinions/paid-parental-leave-katie-bethell/

Bluethmann, J. (2016, September 8).

Dads and Paternity Leave: Why They Should Take it.

MetroParent Daily. (2016, September 15).

Retrieved on September 15, 2016 from http://www.metroparent.com/daily/parenting/parenting-issues-tips/dads-and-paternity-leave-why-they-should-take-it

Dearborn, J. (2016, April. 27).

Offering paid parental leave is just the start. Retrieved September 08, 2016, from http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/04/19/offering-paid-parental-leave-just-start-column/83237980/

Garcia, P. (2016, January 7).

Why Mark Zuckerberg’s paternity leave is beneficial for all working dads—and moms. Vogue. Retrieved on Sept. 8, 2016, from http://www.vogue.com/13385201/mark-zuckerberg-paternity-leave/

Greenberg, J. (2015, August 13).

Tech’s selfish reasons for offering more parental leave. Wired. Retrieved on Sept. 13, 2016, from https://www.wired.com/2015/08/techs-selfish-reasons-offering-parental-leave/

Henderson, D. (2016, August. 26).

Paid Parental Leave Is Not A Free Lunch. Retrieved September 14, 2016, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/08/26/paid-parental-leave-is-not-a-free-lunch/#53cfb77c19eb

May, A. (2016, August 30).

Moms whose infants died in day care petition for 6 months parental leave. USA Today. Retrieved on September 13, 2016 from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/08/30/moms-whose-infants-died-day-care-petition-6-months-parental-leave/89582828

Mayer, K. (2016, September. 15).

Views Parental leave part of a bigger picture. Retrieved September 15, 2016, from http://www.benefitnews.com/opinion/parental-leave-part-of-a-bigger-picture

Peck E. (2015, November 30).

Parental Leave Revolution Moves From Tech To Banking. Retrieved September 13, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tech-banking-parental-leave-revolution_us_565c70e8e4b072e9d1c26939

Pinsker B. (2016, September 14).

As baby leaves go gender-neutral, dads get time off. Retrieved September 15, 2016, from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-employment-benefits-parentalleave-idUSKCN11K2QO

Starner, T. (2016, August 16).

US paid maternity leave policy continues to lag. HRDIVE. Retrieved on September 8, 2016 from http://www.hrdive.com/news/us-paid-maternity-leave-policy-continues-to-lag/424482/

Wojcicki S. (2014, December 16).

Paid Maternity Leave Is Good for Business. Retrieved on September 08, 2016, from http://www.wsj.com/articles/susan-wojcicki-paid-maternity-leave-is-good-for-business-1418773756