The City Essay by Jin

The City Essay

Dallas is the first city of gigantic scale in the United States that I have stayed for some time. Thus my short experience in Dallas gives me the foremost impression of American style’s city life. Situated in the north Texas, Dallas becomes the wide north Texas area’s shining headquarter which meets a big amount of people’s needs, so do I, an fresh international student living in Lubbock with initial curiosity. From my perspective, I would like to share some of my partial but private feelings towards Dallas, rather than only talk about any information which could be depicted directly from a tourism handbook.

Dallas is the city fully immersed in greenery. I could still remember the shock when I landed on Dallas for the first time. When the short flight which I took from Lubbock to Dallas was near the destination, I started to look through the scenery which were getting much clearer. Surprisingly, I founded that the land was covered by rampant greenery with the colorful rooves of houses sprinkled orderly. I even held my breath at one moment, and finally I felt the pleasant vividness presented by the green scenery which was combined with limpid lakes surrounded the airport in harmony. What’s more, I could always find many similar spots with greenery whenever I hanged out in Dallas. The experience was memorable for a man with the boredom of West Texas’s widespread baldness in terms of greenery. Google map definitely would not deceive us.

Dallas is also a city that makes me peaceful like many gigantic cities of Southern America in common. With full appreciation, I could always felt the inherent slow rhythm of life from the presences people’s eyes spread even when I travelled in the downtown, or when I was on the railway connecting different areas of the city on busy weekdays. Probably the international airport was the place in Dallas that reminded me of the existence of crowdedness. However, the leisured city also showed ultimate competence in the United States with its fully developed industries and lenient policies towards starting up a company. No matter who you are, an employee of employer, you will find the possibility of success. That is an inspiring fact.

In conclusion, Dallas is not the only gigantic city in the United States I have ever come to, but is the most memorable one for me for some reasons. I would consider go for here later as well.

(Jin)

TTU Students’ Perception of Social Media

TTU Students’ Perception of Social Media

Yiting Dong

12/05/2016

Abstract

           In this paper, TTU students’ perception of different issues of social media is studied. A survey about social media is made for TTU students in order to find out TTU students’ views on social media. We want to know which kind of social media sites is the most popular for TTU students; how the social media influences TTU students’ lives; what the effect of social media is on TTU students; whether or not social media benefits TTU students’ study or work; whether TTU students are worried about personal privacy being compromised in social media; whether most TTU students think their mood would be altered by some words; how TTU students respond to conflicts in social media; and so on. Based on the results of survey, various reasons TTU students answer the way they do are analytically detailed. TTU students have various ideas for different issues of social media.

Keywords: social media, students, Texas Tech University. 

Introduction

            We are from Texas Tech University (TTU). We studied TTU students’ perception of social media. Recently, there are various kinds of social media in the world, such as Facebook, WeChat, QQ, Twitter and so on. Those social media have changed the means through which TTU students make friends and keep contact. It also makes a possible interaction for students in different cities and countries, because there are many international students from different countries at TTU. Social media offer platforms that everyone can use freely. They give TTU students the opportunity to share information and the level of interaction is very high, because your contacts, to whom your message is being carried, are always online. Specifically, when you send a message, the person on the other side receives it as soon as possible, and then, the interaction goes on. Even from the perspective of business, some businessmen deal with business and earn money by using social media. For example, businessmen use social media to do their advertising for products, goods and services. In fact, they use social media to connect and build relationships with customers and future prospects. Social media make the world talk!

            However, just as a famous saying goes: Every coin has two sides. Although social media bring many benefits for students, there are exactly some disadvantages to TTU students’ lives of using social media. Some students believe that communication on social media will replace face-to-face contact in the future. There are some reasons behind this attitude. On the one hand, these social media are useful and powerful tools that have made it much faster, easier and cheaper to keep in contact with various people in different cities and counties. For example, it is possible that many research assistants at TTU discuss some research problems with their professors in different places using social media now. On the other hand, some students even think that students cannot live without social media nowadays, especially Internet and Wi-Fi. When students arrive at a place, the first thing most students do is connect the Wi-Fi, which is a common phenomenon on campus. Therefore, the general problems with social media are the positive or negative influenced of social media. In the writing class, my group decided to study TTU students’ perception of the influence of social media. Social media is a big topic, and there are many positive and negative effects for TTU students. My group was interested in various angles: what kind of social media was used for most students; how long students use social media every day; how to use social media effectively; etc. From my perspective, I am especially interested in the personal privacy problem caused by social media.

Literature Review

            It is undoubtedly true that social media contribute to students’ personal development. Firstly, social media can be functioned to facilitate human memory. “Memory is often selective. But in this case, the selection is not done by our own mind; it’s done by an outside resource. So interactive functions on social networking sites can also shape how we view our experiences, how we view ourselves,” said Qi Wang (Kelley, 2016, para. 2). A research study done by Wang and her co-authors, “Externalizing the autobiographical self: sharing personal memories online facilitated memory retention”, was launched to test the function of social media. The results show that people tend to recall things posted online regardless of what kind of things. Therefore, as for TTU students, I believe that they are likely to like remembering things put on social media.

            Next, in the article “Stressed at work? Tell it to Social Media” (Palmquist, 2016, para. 2), the author argues that social media is a good tool to track people’s emotions and moods in real time when they correspond to their work and study environment. An unproductive workplace will cause employees to run late, fall behind, or quit when they just can’t take it anymore.      However, social media has enabled researchers to analyze large, representative data of people who offer their observations using a vast number of data, and new sources of information on social media. Therefore, it is possible that, with the help of this tracking method, TTU students can raise hope even if they suffer from large study pressure from a vast amount of homework or failing the exam. It is possible that families and teachers can clearly know about students’ stress levels by following what TTU students posted on social media. Finally, social media is beneficial for students to study (Tomaszewski, 2012, para. 1). Dr. Richard (Harvard School of Education) and other researchers did a study about students’ study, and the research results show that students can share their opinions and dilemmas using social media in the classroom. Furthermore, the appearance of social media promotes the flow of information and knowledge into different countries when students study (Karadkar, 2015, para. 4). With the rise of social media, students may even be learning to read likes and shares instead of facial expressions (East, 2016, para. 8). Maybe social media are good tools for improving the level of study for TTU students. Moreover, social media affects students’ mental health and well-being (Jung, 2015, para. 1). Dr. Shannon M. Rauch (Benedictine University of Mesa) says the main reasons students use social media are for self-distraction and boredom relief (Honor, 2015, para. 16).

            Although there are some research results mentioned above verifying that social media benefits individuals, some research articles argue that social media have great influences on students’ group lives. On the one hand, social media are powerful tools which help students connect to old friends from primary school, grade school, high school, and college, and distant relatives who students have lost touch with (Morgan, 2016, para. 1). What’s more, social media allows students to communicate with each other no matter how far two people are apart (Shlokinani, 2012, para. 3). Students can not only send messages to receive whether they are online through social media immediately, but also update their lives by posting some pictures or words no matter where they are. Furthermore, students can also discover new interests by being able to see what their friends like or through links shared by friends and family. However, how many times do TTU students use social media to contact with old friends every week? Seldom or Usually? Maybe different TTU students have different answers. On the other hand, social media plays an essential role in any business groups (Holmes, 2015, para. 1). Holmes explains how shopping has become digital and consumers find it easier to go online nowadays. Various networks, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, are evolving as a medium to communicate with our customers and provide services. “For businesses today, the best way to keep our company successful, in my estimation, is to fully embrace social media.” said Holmes. There is a significant increase in the number of TTU students who use Internet to buy various matters. Clearly, most businesses have seen a rise from their active presence on social media.

            On the contrary, there are also some negative impacts for TTU students that are caused by social media. First of all, students are likely to be jealous if they do not participate in the activity that their friends post about (Shlokinani, 2012, para. 7). After they find out about this event, some students tend to wonder why they are not invited and feel depressed. Secondly, social media causes a negative effect on society and individuals (Jung, 2016, para. 4). “Social media makes it more difficult for students to distinguish between the meaningful relationships we foster in the real world, and the numerous casual relationships through social media, especially the young,” said Jung (Jung, 2016, para. 3). That is to say, social media produce a false sense of connection. According to social media, it is clear that cyberbullying has widely spread among the young. Do the disadvantages outweigh the benefits using social media? Nowadays many businessmen use social media to communicate with students, but those social media can also prove a difference to students who show interest in what their families and friends put on social media. It is also too difficult to control when students put something on social media. Posting more personal information will make students lose more privacy. Therefore, it is probably also an important topic for TTU students how to protect privacy. Should the government or relevant authorities set out rules to control it? Then, the long lasting aftermath of violence has sped over social media (Wayne, 2016, para. 2). “Contact with violence through any media tends to lead to what is called vicarious traumatization – may be more upsetting than an unmediated experience”, said Wayne (Wayne, 2016, para. 6). Additionally, social media cannot avoid the responsibility of the impact of events, e.g., distress, elevated stress and so on. Finally, the author states the correlation between the deterioration of mental health among a new generation people and high usage of social media sites (Gregoire, 2016, para. 3). It is also possible that there is a connection between mental health and usage of social media as for TTU students.

Hypotheses

            Because of the mentioned above, I believed that TTU students in general would be in favor of regulation; I believed that some positive or negative words on social media, e.g., “like”, “DO NOT like”, would have an effect on the mood for most TTU students; Most TTU students would tend to believe that social media had a positive impact on social lives and study and research; TTU students would tend to be worried about their privacy because they post some personal information on social media; Most TTU students would think social media could be helpful to remember things.

Methods Section

            We studied TTU students’ perception of social media, parental leave, and Black Lives Matter. From the perspective of social media, we wanted to know how the social media influenced TTU students’ lives; what the effect of social media was for TTU students; whether or not social media benefited TTU students’ study or work; whether TTU students were worried about personal privacy being compromised in social media; whether most TTU students thought their mood would be altered by some words; how TTU students responded to conflicts in social media; and so on. In terms of parental leave and Black Lives Matter, we wanted to know what the attitude of TTU students to parental leave and Black Lives Matter is. Moreover, I was especially interested in the standpoint of TTU students to social media, and I wanted to know whether TTU students in general tend to be in favor of some regulation in social media, e.g., the government or relevant authorities taking steps to protect the personal privacy in social media; whether TTU students thought their mood would be affected by some positive or negative words in social media, e.g., “like”, “DO NOT like; whether TTU students would argue that social media had a positive impact on social lives and study and research; whether TTU students tended to worry about their privacy since some personal information was posted in social media; and whether TTU students believed that social media could be helpful to remember things.  

            In order to solve the problem described above, we made a survey about social media, parental leave, and Black Lives Matter for TTU students, and the survey is given in the Appendix. It is obviously easy to make a simple and ordinary survey, but it is undoubtedly difficult to make a user-friendly survey that has an ability to find out what TTU students’ perceptions are. Firstly, we made many questions focusing on different fields about social media, parental leave, and Black Lives Matter. Then, we discussed with each other many times about whether those questions were reasonable or logical. During the course of the discussion, we put forward a lot of valuable comments and recommendations to polish this survey. For example, we asked for some basic information, e.g., age, sex, and position, at the beginning of the survey, in order to be beneficial to statistics and analysis of data; we made some appropriate changes for some questions whose answers were obvious and apparent; we tried to reduce the number of open questions, which made it more convenient for TTU students to finish the survey; and we added some appropriate options for some questions whose options were not comprehensive. Even after discussion, we were required to submit comments if we believed there were some places that should be revised. 

            Next, we made an agreement for everyone, in order to collect the data efficiently from TTU students in a short period of time. Everyone in the class needed to ask TTU students to finish the survey, at least 6 American males and 6 American females and ourselves. All the students being investigated and required to finish the survey were from TTU. However, there was still a problem. Although we were pretty sure that the male/female ratio would be close to 50/50, it was obviously not representative in terms of every student, because TTU students were not able to get surveys anywhere. We wanted to find out perceptions of TTU students. Therefore, we planned to collect at least 300 useful and effective surveys. After all, the more, the better. That is to say, the more data, the more convincing results are obtained. Finally, we used Google Sheets, where we could create a Google Sheet and edit with others at the same time, to input and collect data.

Results Section

            Fortunately, we finished exactly 296 surveys, which included 150 surveys from males and 146 surveys from females. That is to say, the male/female rate was close to 50/50. However, the proportion of undergraduates was 67.2%, while that of graduate and faculty/staff/other was 28% and 4.8%, respectively.

            We believed that TTU students in general would be in favor of regulations in social media. However, the result of the survey was different from what we expected, and just a few TTU students firmly believed that they should be in favor of regulations. As for one question about personal privacy in the survey, “Should the government take steps to protect the personal privacy in social media,” only 33.8% thought that the government should take steps to protect the personal privacy in social media, whereas 27% said there was no need to protect the personal privacy in social media; nevertheless, 39.2% believed it should depend. Moreover, undergraduate students were less likely to support government’s control on social media. As for students who would be in favor of regulations, 62.6% were undergraduate, 33.3% were graduate and only 4% were others. For TTU students who were clearly not supportive, the proportion of undergraduate students reached 70.9%, but that of graduate students was 24.1% and that of others was only 5.1%. For another question about violent scenarios, “Do you think posting violent scenarios in social media sites is controlled enough?” the results were a little different from that of the former question. Most TTU students believed that posting violent scenarios was not controlled enough in social media sites. There were totally 45.4%, which was much larger than the number of TTU students who thought the government should take steps to protect the personal privacy, who believed that posting violent scenarios was not controlled enough obviously. 27% argued that this phenomenon was controlled enough and 27.6% were not sure about it.

            We thought that some positive or negative words in social media, e.g., “like”, “DO NOT like”, would have an effect on the mood for most TTU students. In general, most TTU students did not say that their moods were altered because of those words. 55.7% said that “like” or lack of them would not alter their moods, whereas 26.8% said yes. There were still 15.1% who were not sure, and only 2.4% who argued they never used them. Furthermore, in the number of TTU students whose moods didn’t be altered by those words, the male rate was 55.6%, which was larger than the female rate, at 44.4%.  On the other hand, females were more likely to be affected than males. As for the people who believed that those words would alter their moods, the male and the female rates were 47.4% and 52.6%, respectively.

            We also believed that most TTU students tended to think that social media had a positive impact on social lives and study. From the results of the survey, most TTU students thought social media would have a positive effect on social lives and study. As for the question, “Do you think social media can be helpful for better studies,” 55.7% believed that it was definitely helpful, whereas 44.3% said that it wasn’t. Moreover, the data was not the same for different genders. Namely, 52.1% of males and 59.4% of females supported the idea that social media would benefit better study. As for another question, “Do you think social media has a positive impact on your social life or a negative impact”, the number of positive, negative and not sure was 48.6%, 15.3% and 35.7%, respectively. For this question, male and female rates maintained an amazing consistency, 48.3% and 49%. We also investigated how much TTU students thought social media helped them to have a dialogue with the people they didn’t know. 62.1% thought social media helped sometimes, whereas 31.7% didn’t think so. However, males and females had different ideas for this problem. Most females, 65.5% thought social media helped them to have interactions with someone who they didn’t know. But the rate was 58.8% of males, which was much fewer than that of females.

            We thought that most TTU students were worried about their privacy because they tended to post some personal information on social media. However, different people had different opinions.  36.6% said it was obvious that the personal privacy would be compromised in social media, whereas 28.1% believed that they were never worried about the personal privacy problem in social media, but 35.5% argued that they were worried about personal privacy a little. In terms of gender, 33.1% of males didn’t believe the personal privacy would be compromised in social media, but the figure was only 22.9% for females.

            We thought most TTU students believed social media would be helpful to remember things. However, just a few TTU students thought social media was helpful to remember. There was only 26% of respondents who thought social media was beneficial for them to remember things, and 74% disagreed with it. Furthermore, 36% of undergraduates said that social media benefited for them to remember, whereas only 15.9% of graduates thought social media could help them, and no faculty or staff believed it would help them to remember.

Discussion Section

            We found that most TTU students in general would not be in favor of regulations in social media. We thought that the possible reasons for this phenomenon were as follows: Firstly, as for most TTU students, their personal privacy in social media may not have been violated. Therefore, they may have felt no need to impose additional steps to protect the personal privacy in social media. Secondly, it was possible that they felt that whatever social medium they used was doing very well for the personal privacy protection, so that most TTU students could be assured when putting some personal information on social media, and didn’t think that the government should take steps to protect the personal privacy any more. Finally, it was also possible that most TTU students didn’t care whether their personal privacy was violated or not, so that they didn’t care whether the government should take steps to protect students’ personal privacy or not. But there were still a few students who worried about this problem. Females tended to be more worried about the privacy protection than males. Maybe females would like to pay more attention to the privacy protection. However, this phenomenon may be caused by the limitations of the survey. We wanted to find out whether TTU students were in favor of regulations in social media, but there were only two questions in the survey; one was about personal privacy protection and the other was about violent scenarios. If we want to find out more information about whether TTU students are in favor of regulations in social media or not, we should add more questions about regulations in the survey in the future.

            We found that most TTU students said that they did not have their moods altered because of some positive or negative words in social media, e.g., “like”, or “DO NOT like”. We thought there were some possible reasons for this phenomenon. It was possible that some TTU students didn’t use those positive or negative words on social media, so that they said that their moods weren’t altered by those words. It was also possible that the most important role of social media for TTU students was to put some information or ideas to express in there, not to get feedback from others. There was another interesting phenomenon: in the number of TTU students who said that they didn’t feel their moods were altered, the male rate was 55.6%, which was larger than the female rate, at 44.4%. It was possible that males were more likely to deny any subtle influences on their moods.

            We also found that most TTU students thought social media would have a positive effect on social lives and study. There were some possible reasons for this. First, it was possible that most TTU students would discuss some learning problems on social media, which tended to benefit their study. Next, it was also possible TTU students maybe use social media to connect to old friends from primary school, grade school, high school, and college, who those students had otherwise lost touch with. Furthermore, most TTU students may share some interests and make new friends on social media, which would be beneficial to students’ social lives. However, the data was not the same for different genders in some respects.  We investigated how much TTU students thought social media helped them to have a dialogue with the people they didn’t know. The number of females who thought social media helped them to have interactions with someone who they didn’t know, was much larger than that of males. It may be possible that females prefer to contact friends on social media, while males like to do other things, e.g., sharing interests, playing games and so on.

            Finally, we found that just a few TTU students thought social media was helpful to remember. It was possible that most TTU students used social media to have fun or share interests, rather than remembering things. Moreover, most TTU students put some information that may be not relevant to remember on social media. However, this phenomenon may not mean that the social media didn’t influence them, because they were just denying that social media was helpful to remember. We thought that we had better add more questions about how many students didn’t like the memory function or others in the survey in future, so that we could find out more information about whether TTU students were just denying that social media was helpful to remember or not.

Conclusion

            In this paper, we studied TTU students’ perception of the influence of social media. Firstly, we did a literature review of the current research results on social media. Next, some interesting hypotheses were proposed to predict TTU students’ perception of various issues of social media. Methods section was introduced to illustrate what methods we wanted to use to study TTU students’ views on social media. The results from the survey were given, and we made a detailed analysis of the results. TTU students had various ideas for different issues of social media. Most TTU students in general would not be in favor of regulations in social media. Most TTU students said that they did not have their moods altered because of some positive or negative words in social media, e.g., “like”, or “DO NOT like”. Most TTU students thought social media would have a positive effect on social lives and study. Most TTU students were not worried about their personal privacy because they tended to post some personal information on social media. Finally, just a few TTU students thought social media was helpful to remember.

 Appendix

Survey Link

Bibliography

East, S. (2016, August 1). Teens: This is how social media affects your brain. CNN. Retrieved on October 6, 2016. From http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/health/social-media-brain/

Gregoire, C. (2015, June 28). Heavy social media use linked with mental health issues in teens. The Huffington Post. Retrieved on October 6, 2016. From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/social-media-mental health_us_55b129d9e4b08f57d5d3eedf

Holmes, R. (2015, November 18). Why businesses can’t survive without social media. Fortune. Retrieved on October, 6, 2016. From http://fortune.com/2015/11/18/businesses-cant-survive-social-media/

Honor, W. (2015, June 10). Social media: how does it affect our mental health and well-being? Medical News Today. Retrieved on October, 6, 2016. From http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/275361.php

Jung, B. (2015, January 4). The negative effect of social media on society and individuals. Demand Media. Retrieved on October, 6, 2016. From http://smallbusiness.chron.com/negative-effect-social-media-society-individuals-27617.html

Kelley, S. (2016, September 7). Posting personal experiences on social media may help you remember them in the future. Science Daily. Retrieved on October 6, 2016. From https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160907143204.htm

Karadkar, A. (2015, September 13). The impact of social media on student life. Technician. Retrieved October 6, 2016. From http://www.technicianonline.com/opinion/article_d1142b70-5a92-11e5-86b4-cb7c98a6e45f.html

Morgan, C. (2016, May 27). Social media and technology: Have we gone too far? The Huffington Post. Retrieved on October 6, 2016. From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-carol-morgan/social-media-and-technology-have-we-gone-too-far_b_10152504.html

Palmquist, M. (2016, September 15). Stressed at work? Tell it to social media. Strategy+Business. Retrieved on October 6, 2016. From http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Stressed-at-Work-Tell-It-to-Social-Media?gko=eab8b

Shlokinani. (2012, November 12). Effects of Facebook on communication – Its impact and study. GOCOMPU. Retrieved on October 6, 2016. https://gocompu.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/effects-of-facebook-on-communication-its-impact-and-study/

Tomasjewski, J. (2012). Study suggests benefits of social media in the classroom. Education World. Retrieved on October 6, 2016. From http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/study-suggests-social-media-has-place-in-classrooms.shtml

Wayne, T. (2016, September 11). The trauma of violent news on the Internet. The New York Times. Retrieved on October 6, 2016. From http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/fashion/the-trauma-of-violent-news-on-the-internet.html?_r=0

Views of Parental Leave from Texas Tech Community by Rui

                        Views of Parental Leave from Texas Tech Community

Rui Liu

Abstract

        Parental leave in the U.S is worse compared to the rest of the world. Lots of debates regarding this issue have proceeded for a while. We conducted a survey to investigate how the Texas Tech University community thinks about Parental Leave. Our results showed that older people and females cared more about parental leave and wanted more rights. Also, although Texans did not like government involvement in business, still more than half of both Texans and non-Texans support parental leave. More people did not believe Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would actually make a policy of paid parental leave even if they promised they would. 

Introduction

        One thing that most young employees cannot avoid is that they will have a baby sooner or later during their employment. Once they have a baby, they have to take parental leave to take care of the baby, which seems natural and reasonable. However, it is not pleasant all the time; some companies do not give paternity leave to men, some companies do not give paid parental leave, some companies do not give enough time of parental leave, some companies give parental leave but at the same time, give you pressure to not take it, etc. These issues related to parental leave would be our research topic. We are students from Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, Texas, with 35,893 students (Barton, 2015). We are taking a writing class and we are interested in parental leave. We will conduct a questionnaire survey to TTU students about this issue. We will find out how the Texas Tech community feels. We are interested in a wide variety of questions: the length of parental leave, whether government should mandate companies to offer parental leave, paid or unpaid leave, etc. Specifically, I am most interested in TTU students’ perceptions of whether dads should take paternity leave and the length of leave compared to women.

Literature review

             According to Starner (2016) and Mayer (2016), parental leave in the U.S. is worse compared to the rest of the world. A study conducted by the Labor Department in 2012 showed that 23% of polled women take parental leave for less than two weeks. But this amount of time is clearly not enough; even the 12-weeks’ parental leave suggested by Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is not satisfactory to new parents. A report from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Trachtenberg, 2012) shows that infant death is more common before they reach 6 months. There are already some tragedies that have happened to newborn babies whose parents spent less than 6 months caring for them before sending them to daycares, which clearly do not take serious responsibility, and cause infant death (May, 2016).

             The reasons behind poor parental leave in the U.S. are first, due to the highly competitive working environment. People are under great pressure and forced to make a choice, family or work, and most parents choose work. Second, American companies encourage employees not to take parental leave, ignoring federal solutions (Kimmel, 2016). Even employers themselves take less parental leave; for example, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg only took half of the time he offered to his employees; Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer only took two weeks off (Dearborn, 2016).

              Hypothesis: Texans tend to be more traditional and more aware of their contributions to family than non-Texans; thus, I think TTU students are likely to take parental leave even their boss and peers do not take it. But men are more ambitious and career-oriented compared to women, I think male students are would take parental leave than female.

           Government control seems a good way to make parental leave come true. However, the idea of government control is unpopular to Americans, due to their traditional desire to be free of government’s regulation. Texas itself has its own opinion and laws, thus Texans are especially against it, at least traditionally.

           Hypothesis: I think TTU students will represent the opinions of Texans, so they will also disagree with government control on parental leave. We think Texans are less likely to agree to government control than non-Texans

             The good news is this situation is changing; lots of companies have begun to give this benefit to parents. Tech companies in Silicon Valley provide paid parental leave, which is not only good to their current employees, but also helps companies to attract more talented employees (Greenberg, 2015). This revolution also has swept to the banking sector; Credit Suisse offers paid maternity leave for up to 20 weeks (Peck, 2015). More and more companies have begun to follow this trend.

             Hypothesis: When a person holds a perception, he/she tends to believe others will also have a similar opinion. So we think older people and people who have child/children, realizing the importance of paid parental leave, are likely to believe unmarried men will also favor paid parental leave as they do. Younger people and people who do not have child/children, not seeing the problem, are likely to think others will also say ‘no’ to paid parental leave like them.

             To the newborn children, the importance of dads’ involvement is not less than moms’. Dads have the right to enjoy once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and develop connections with their infants. Also, as women go through very hard time to deliver a baby, they need men’s support, both physically and emotionally (Bluethmann, 2016). Traditionally it is not common for men to take paternity leave; they do not want to appear weak to other people, especially to their employers (Bluethmann, 2016). But recently men’s contributions have been recognized and paternity leave has begun to be agreed to by more employers (Pinsker, 2016).

               Hypothesis: Younger people are more energetic, career-oriented and they do not realize the importance of their contribution to family yet, so they tend to not ask more rights for paternity leave. Older people are more family-oriented and are likely to ask more rights for paternity leave.  Also, women are more family-oriented than men; they probably will support equality, so that men could have more time than before to take care of mother and newborn baby.

             Parental leave also has attracted politicians’ attention. Recently in the American President Election, both final candidates mentioned parental leave. Donald Trump proposed paid maternity leave for six weeks, which was criticized as too short and as not considering new fathers (Bethell, 2016). Hillary Clinton’s policy is to increase parental leave up to 12 months, which was criticized as too long and as making employers less likely to hire women; also, the cost of paid parental leave will put too much burden on tax payers (Henderson, 2016).

               Hypothesis: Based on the information above, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s policy have shortcomings, which probably means they did not really think about this problem or they just do not want to annoy people from big business. Also, American Presidential candidates have a tradition of giving their people a good promise to win more votes, and the American people know this point, so we think TTU students do not think they will make a policy after they become president.

Methods

            We had various interests and curiosity about how Tech people think about Social Media, Parental Leave and Black Lives Matter. For me, I was especially interested in Parental Leave. I had some hypotheses; for example, Texans (or females) would be  more likely to take parental leave as they are more traditional and family-oriented, compared to other people in the US; Texans would be less likely to agree to government control on parental leave because they do not like government interference on company business; older people (or people who have child/children) tend to think unmarried men will favor paid parental leave because they think this is a benefit to young men; older people (or females) would ask for more rights for paternal leave because they believe this is beneficial for the family; TTU students would be unlikely to think Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will make policy about parental leave, due to its notorious reputation that American Presidential candidates have a tradition to make fake promises to win more votes. For my classmates, they have their own hypotheses related to Social Media, Parental Leave and Black Lives Matter.

               So, we made a survey that was designed according to our hypotheses. For my topic of Parental Leave, we asked questions like whether they agree parental leave should be mandated by government; if they would take parental leave when other people do not take it; if they prefer the job with parental leave; their ideas of whether unmarried men would vote for paid parental leave; and whether they think the presidential nominee will make a policy of paid parental leave after he or she becomes a president. We preferred simpler answers which would be easier for us to analyze. For example, most of our answers were provided in this way: “Yes”, “No” and “Maybe/Depends”. But to some questions we wanted to know in more detail, like the question of people’s opinion about the length of paternity leave compared to maternity leave. We provided the answers like paternal leave is unnecessary, sufficient, extended, equal to maternity leave or other/don’t know. We tried our best to provide options to cover all possible answers. For example, we did not just provide “Yes” or “No” options, we also provided “Maybe” or “Depends” or “Don’t know”. I have hypotheses related to age, gender or place where they are from, so we also devised demographic questions like “male” or “female”, “Texas”, “USA, not Texas” or “International”, etc. to distinguish different groups. There were also many questions related to Social Media and Black Lives Matter in the survey.

               All the questions in the survey were devised by ourselves, modified by Prof. Leverett and printed on paper with both sides. In order to collect enough information for us to analyze, we made an agreement. Each of us taking the class should have at least 13 surveys, including 6 American males and 6 American females, ourselves and any others from Tech community. We agreed to investigate 6 males and 6 females because we wanted to get similar numbers of males and females in order to eliminate any gender bias. We attempted to make our sample representative in gender. We admitted that in some aspects, it was not representative. For example, as TTU had more undergraduate students than graduate students, our participants tended to be at age range of 18-22; students were by and large from Texas, our participants tended to be Texans; we did not survey every department, so opinions in departments not surveyed were omitted; most of our participants were White, we did not get equal number of Black, Hispanic, etc.  In the end, we had 290 surveys.          

             We used Google Sheets to collect data. Our Teaching Assistant, Achintha Bandara, made the sheets and invited us to put our data into the sheets online. The sheets are mainly divided into three pages, Social Media, Parental Leave and Black Lives Matter. 

Results

        290 participants from TTU community took our survey, of whom 144 were females and 146 were males, which met our expectation to have representative sample at least on gender. But one female participant did not provide complete information about places to come from and whether she had child/children or not, so we would not include her when we analyzed data. 86% of the participants were Americans, of whom 76% were Texans; 24% were from other states of the U.S.A. The rest, about 14% of total participants, were internationals. Also, the number of participants who had child/children was 19 and only occupied 6% of the total participants. Therefore, our study to compare their opinion with the people who did not have child/children might not be very convincing. In the end, based on the data we got from our survey, I got the following results related to Parental Leave.

         I believed Texans or female students would be more likely to take parental leave when their boss and peers did not take it, as they were more traditional and family-oriented compared to non-Texans or males. However, our data showed no evidence that Texans and females cared more to take parental leave. Nearly 58% of Texans chose to take it, while for non-Texans, this number went up to 60%. Females and males both had the same number of 58% to choose parental leave. When the question went to if they preferred companies with parental leave over companies without parental leave, when other conditions of the companies were similar, Texans still did not show any family-oriented characteristics as I thought, but more females chose the job with parental leave. Only 53% of Texas were willing to choose a job with parental leave, while this number for non-Texans reached 62%. For the females, 61%, compared to males who had 52%, preferred jobs with parental leave.

         Also, I thought Texan students were less likely to agree with government control on parental leave, because they did not like government interference. For example, when President Obama tried to make curbs on guns, Texas Governor Greg Abbott struck back on Twitter with “COME AND TAKE IT”, which represented most Texans’ attitude to Federal Government’s attempt to control (Fields, 2016). Consistent with my expectation, Texans were more likely to say “No” to government control on parental leave. 19% of non-Texans from USA did not like government control on business; however, for Texans, this number went up to 24%. Although people did not like government control, when it came to mandated parental leave, still, more than half of the people, no matter whether they were Texans or non-Texans, agreed with parental leave being enforced by government. In the data, 53% of Texans agreed with government control on parental leave, and about the same number, 54% of non-Texans from the USA, held the same perception.

          Another of my hypotheses was that older people or people who had child/children tended to think unmarried men would favor paid parental leave. That was because when a person held a perception, he/she tended to believe others would also had a similar opinion. Older people and people who had child/children, realizing the importance of paid parental leave, were likely to believe unmarried men would also favor paid parental leave as they did. Young people, who were not to the step of being parents, might think parental leave was not their business. Thus they would not vote for paid parental leave. To my surprise, the result was totally opposite. It turned out that the more people realized the importance of parental leave, the less likely they believed unmarried men would agree to paid parental leave: young people, other than old people or people who had child/children, were more likely to believe that an unmarried man would prefer paid parental leave. It was observed that 29% of people at age range of 18-22 chose to think unmarried men would vote for paid parental leave, while 26% of people at age greater than 22 shared the same idea. To the people who have child/children, this number dropped to 21%.

           I hold the opinion that older people or females would ask more rights for paternal leave because they believed this was beneficial for the family. Clearly, the data indeed indicated older people and females were unsatisfied with our provided paternal leave of 1-2 weeks. They tended to ask more rights for paternal leave, which in our survey was whether paternal leave should be extended or equal to maternity leave. 66% of people at age greater than 22 preferred longer time of paternal leave, compared to 60% of people at age range of 18-22. Also, 65% of females asked more time for paternal leave, and this number for males was 58%.

          I expected TTU students unlikely to think Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would make policy about parental leave, because the community knew that in American history, presidential nominees always lied to win votes. And this time there was also no exception. Just as I thought, more people agreed that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would not actually make a policy of paid parental leave when she or he became a president. In the data, 28% of people did not think these two presidential nominees would make a policy, and only 21% thought they would; the rest of the people said it depends. Truly parental leave policy could help presidential nominees win votes. The data showed that more than half of participants (51%) would support a presidential nominee more than before if he or she announced a proposal of paid parental leave. And only 18% of participants would not change their position.

Discussion

          Our data indicated that older people and females were unsatisfied with our provided paternal leave of 1-2 weeks, and tended to ask more rights for paternal leave. This was because older people and females were more family-oriented, so they wanted fathers to spend more time to take care of the family. This result also gave me some memories. I lived with my mother and my wife, who took care of my two-month old girl. I instead spent most of my time on campus, escaping my responsibility. It turned out that older people and women had stronger feelings about the men helping at home, while the men themselves were more ambivalent (in many cases, they were actually more comfortable at work). The survey showed this point that older people and females needed fathers to be involved more with the family.

           Our result showed that Texans did not show any family-oriented characteristics, but more females preferred to choose jobs with parental leave compared to males. The possible reason was that Texans were not family-oriented as originally thought, or probably they were more involved in business than family. This could be tested by asking more direct questions. This gave advice to social scientists that an investigation had to be made before a conclusion was made.

         We found that young people, other than old people or people who had child/children, were actually more likely to believe the unmarried man would prefer paid parental leave. This was probably because older people who thought young people did not know anything about parental leave, tended to criticize and did not trust young people. In this case, older people did not appear to think objectively. They came up with their opinion based on their attitude to young people, which would interfere with the result. Of course, this was human nature. An advice to social scientists, the question devised should lead participants to think objectively rather than emotionally. The data for participants who had child/children may not quite convincing, because only 19 people had child/children. This could be solved if more people participated and people with child/children were specifically targeted.

            We found that a parental leave policy could help presidential nominees win votes. But the truth was more people did not think Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would actually make a policy of paid parental leave when she or he became a president. This indicated that people were actually in contradiction. On one hand they hoped their president made a policy for parental leave, but on the other hand, they did not trust their president nominees would do that. This was owed to its notorious reputation that American Presidential candidates had a tradition to make fake promises to win votes. Our survey conveyed a dangerous sign to an American President: if he/she made a promise to his/her people, he/she should carry out the promise; otherwise, he/she would lose trust from his/her people. The power was given by its people; if its people lost trust, they would take back this power.

            We also found out that although Texans did not like government involvement in business, more than half of both Texans and non-Texans still support parental leave. The reasons could be we thought wrongly about Texans, and probably they liked government control. This could be found out by devising a more direct question to find people’s attitude about government control. Or the participants who were ‘Texans’ may not actually be Texans; they may have moved from other states and settled in Texas, so they probably did not represent the idea of ‘real Texans’. Or, Texans might be against government involvement, but they were more in favor of parental leave. This result was similar to the result we got from our survey about Social Media, only about one third of people agreed government control on personal privacy, but when it came to social media violence, nearly half of participants supported government interference. The suggested that most people were rational: they would not blindly be against a policy for no reason just because they did not like government control.

          As for the limitations of the study, we only had 290 samples, which made some of our data not convincing. But if more funding was provided, we could have more people who participated and have more accurate results. Also, some questions failed to meet our expectation. But if more time was given, we could devise more comprehensive questions and find more representative participants to get closer to truth.

Conclusion

         We did a survey to investigate TTU community’s attitude toward Parental Leave. Anyone who tries to make a policy about Parental Leave should know how people feel about it. We made a questionnaire and 290 people participated. We found that older people and females were unsatisfied with our provided paternal leave of 1-2 weeks, and tended to ask more rights for paternal leave. Texans did not show any family-oriented characteristics on parental leave as I originally thought, but more females preferred to choose jobs with parental leave compared to males; young people, other than old people or people who had child/children, were actually more likely to believe the unmarried man would prefer paid parental leave; more people did not think Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would actually make a policy of paid parental leave when she or he became a president; although Texans did not like government involvement in business, more than half of both Texans and non-Texans still support parental leave.

Appendix

       Survey Link

Bibliography

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Impact of Social Media on the Texas Tech Community by Rafikul Islam

Impact of Social Media on the Texas Tech Community

Rafikul Islam

12/06/2016

Abstract

We surveyed about 300 people out of 33,000 people of the Texas Tech University (TTU) community to get the impact of social media on the Texas Tech community.  We found that the TTU community believed that social media can be used to change the society.  The TTU community females believed that use of personal information might not hamper their personal privacy.  The TTU community use social media for making news, checking news, and shopping.  Most of the TTU community like it when Facebook posts their memories.  Finally, we found that the TTU community tries to avoid using social media during the classes.

Introduction

We decided to study the effects of use of social media on the TTU community. Either people use social media for making friends, or people use social media for making social changes by doing some social activities.  People also might make social networking to keep contacts with friends. Social networking might be developed in Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other similar existing sites.  Social media has seven building blocks: uniqueness, discussions, sharing, existence, associations, status, and groups (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011).  These building blocks might be used to do a lot of useful works like marketing a product, communication, and expressing opinion.  The uses of social media are vast.  People might use social media for different purposes.  Li et al. showed that people might use social media for expressing their opinion to others (Li, Li, & Zhu, 2016).  Although the application of social media is vast, using social media during the class for non-class purposes might have bad impact on the students’ learning.  Now, people think about the effect of sharing personal information in social media.  Some might think that personal privacy can be hidden by changing social media settings.  Also, people might think that personal privacy might be hampered due to the use of personal information in the social media.  In this project, we analyzed how people think about all the above cases.  However, we did not study how good are the social media or how we should control the use of social media.  We studied how people think about the social media.

Literature Review

The uses of social media are versatile.  Social media also are used for communication among friends.  Especially teens use social media for communicating with their friends (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010).  Sometimes it may have bad effects on the teens due to sharing of personal information in the social media.  Facebook is very popular to the teens as most of them use Facebook for communication with each other (Lenhart, 2015).  Almost 24% of teens use social media constantly (Lenhart, 2015).  The awareness of the parents is necessary about their children’s use of social media (O'Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011).  The solutions of bad uses of social media are important (Barnes, 2006).  Teens share a lot of personal information in the social media, which may be harmful for them (Madden et al., 2013).  Sometimes, they share their personal information for fun only (Correa, Hinsley, & De Zuniga, 2010). Parents are trying to find out the problem of social media for their children (Yardi & Bruckman, 2011).

A recent article showed the enhanced use of Social Media for the academic and non-academic purposes (Swanson & Walker, 2015).  The use of Social Media during the classes for non-academic purposes might have bad impact on the students’ grade, because students may not concentrate on the classes due to the use of social media in the class period (Kornhauser, Paul, & Siedlecki, 2016).  However, it might not have bad impact to use Social Media for the academic purposes.  It was observed that the use of Twitter for the academic purposes enhanced the performance of the students for a course (Junco, Heiberger, & Loken, 2011).  In that class both students and instructor used Twitter to maintain communication among students and instructor for academic purposes. 

Hypotheses

In this work, we as a group of ESL 5315, Texas Tech University, decided to study Texas Tech students’ (TTU) perception about social media; our group was interested in use of social media for promoting social awareness, impact of social media on the social life, for which social media is used mostly, use of social media in building networks with people, government control about social media, social media for expressing opinions, use of social media during the classes, and use of social media for the study purposes. I was mostly interested in use of social media for promoting social awareness, use of personal information in social media, use of social media in expressing opinion, and use of social media during the classes.  The survey questions about social media is attached in the Appendix A. The survey questions were prepared by our members of academic writing class. Each member submitted five questions initially.  Our instructor selected the appropriate questions among the total questions submitted by the group members of academic writing class. It is recommended to the interested reader to read the survey questions to get better idea about our survey. We hypothesize that people use social media for doing social change through sharing news, films, and social awareness issues.  Although people use social media for making friends mostly, now people might think to use social media for changing society by sharing news and creating social awareness.  We analyzed the TTU community’s perspective about use of social media for social change.  We premised that females worried more about hampering personal privacy in social media due to the use of personal information in social media.  We reasoned that either females are more concerned about hampering personal privacy in social media or they think there is little effect on personal privacy due to the use of personal information in social media.  We hypothesized that people use social media to express their opinion.  People might post their opinion in social media for getting responses from his social media friends and followers about their opinion.  Therefore, people in the TTU community also might think that people can use social media for expressing their opinion.   We also hypothesized that people like such Facebook activities as when Facebook posts their old posts or memories.  Usually, people like to be reminded of their old good memories.  However, people also might be unhappy by seeing their bad memories in Facebook posts.  We analyzed TTU community perceptions about such activities of Facebook.  Finally, we hypothesized that people may think that using social media during the classes might hamper students’ results.  People might think that students become unable to concentrate to the classes due to the use of social media in the classes.  Therefore, people think that it is good to avoid mobile phone during the classes to get concentrated in classes.

Methods        

Texas Tech University is the public university, which is one of the largest research universities in the world.  The enrollment of Texas Tech University is about 33,000.  There are huge variety in TTU community.  From all part of the United States, students come to Texas Tech University for purpose of study.  Also, all of international students from different countries come to Texas Tech University to do research as well as to study   in different disciplines of Texas Tech University. In our academic writing class, we performed a survey in the Texas Tech Community. Our academic writing group surveyed 300 students from approximately 33,000 Texas Tech students.  We had approximately 24 group members.  Each member took data from at least 13 informants of the Texas Tech Community.  Among 13 informants, 12 were American, and the other could be any including internationals, or anyone we wanted. Also, there were at least 6 males and 6 females among 13 informants. We collected information from informants randomly at different locations of TTU, for example, Student Union Building, Library, and academic departments of TTU.  The survey consisted of 36 questions.  Eighteen questions were related to the social media, nine questions were related to the parental leave, and rest of the questions were related to the Black Lives Matter.  I analyzed the data related to the social media questionnaires. Our group took demographic information, and opinions about Social Media usage, Black Lives Matter, and Parental Leave. In this project, we had three groups, and these groups analyzed data about Social Media usage, Black Lives Matter, and Parental Leave separately.  I, myself, was one of the members of Social Media usage group.  My groups had some questionnaires about Social Media usages.  We mainly asked informants about their demographic information and how they felt about the Social Media usages.  The demographic questions included class (either they are undergraduate, graduate, faculty, staff, or other), sex, age, and origin of the informants (either they are from Texas, USA but not Texans, or international).  We also asked one question about their family (either they have child or not).  The Social Media usage questions were about how people think of Social Media as a tool for social changes, positive or negative impact of Social Media usages, how many hours they spent on Social Media per day, what Social Media people use mainly, compromise of personal privacy in Social Media, usages of Social Media during the classes, government actions to protect personal privacy, and how people respond to conflicts in Social Media.  We also tried to get information about what the most popular social media people use most frequently every day is.  In addition to that, we asked one question about how people make dialogue with the people they do not know, and what is their passion for using social media applications.  Our informants were interested to fill up our survey.  Our questionnaires gave us enough information that we wanted to get from this survey.  We asked most of the questions by giving them some options to answer the questions. However, we could arrange the survey questions in different ways.  For example, we might ask them to write their opinion about the impact of Social Media usages and overall how they felt about the whole survey without giving them options.  In those cases, we might get better data about the survey.  We surveyed only 300 Texas Tech University students, who were not very representative among approximately 33,000 TTU students. However, we surveyed approximately equal numbers of male and female representatives in this survey.  Therefore, our pool was representative in male and female distribution. We did not perform our survey in locations of TTU community like the Business school, Law school, TTU campus housing, or other places. Therefore, our pool was not very representative about the possible locations among the locations of TTU. Our survey was restricted to the TTU community only, and hence our results might not be representative of other school communities, because the TTU community might be different from other school communities in different ways, for example, in demographics, age, and originality. Also, other school community representatives might have different perceptions about the usages of Social Media. 

At the end of the survey, we used Google Sheets to process the information that we got from the informants.  The Google Sheets were shared among all group members, and our group members inserted their survey responses in the Google Sheets.  Each group member inserted information from 13 informants.  We counted the number of people answering each question based on sex, class (undergraduate, graduate, or Faculty/staff), origin of the informants, and other criteria.  We extracted data from our local commuter Excel sheet for analyzing data because Excel sheet is more user friendly than Google Sheets.

Results

The most important part of a survey to analyze the survey questions carefully.  In this section, we analyzed our results based on the hypotheses we made in the hypothesis section of our report. We surveyed almost 200 undergraduates, 80 graduate students, and some faculty and staff at Texas Tech University.  Our informants included nearly equal numbers of males and females.  They were mostly between 18-22 years old, and they were mostly Texans.  The informants expressed their opinions about social media usage.  Most of the people use social media more than 2 hours per day. As per our survey results, 70 percent of informants use different social media for more than 2 hours per day. We found that most of the people use Facebook frequently. These numbers of people are more than 120 out of almost 300 people in the Texas Tech community. Also, we found significant users in Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We found 50 informants use Snapchat, 45 use Twitter, 40 use Instagram, and another group use LinkedIn. However, these people might use those social media less frequently than most who frequently used social media.

We hypothesized that most of the people use social media for making social change through sharing news, films, and social awareness activities. We found that almost 120   informants believed that social media might contribute to social changes. Only 60 people believed that it might have a contribution to make to social awareness. Other people were confused about this statement. These people thought that social media might be used for only making friends, doing communications, and checking news. Also, some people thought that it might not contribute at all to change the society. This number was less than ten.

We assumed that females would be more concerned about personal privacy being compromised in social media.  However, most of the females believed that personal privacy is not hampered due to the use of social media. Only 20 percent of female informants believed that using personal information in social media may hamper personal privacy, and almost 10 percent of females believed that using personal data in social media might cause a little hampering of personal privacy. During collection of information, some females also said that compromising personal privacy depends on the users, because users can hide personal information in social media by changing settings in social media.  Therefore, other people might not get any personal information about those users unless the users disclose their information to the others by changing settings in social media.  The males were not so much concerned about the hampering of personal privacy in social media.  More than 55 percent of males thought that using social media might not hamper personal privacy at all.

We expected that people use social media to express their opinion.  However, we found different results from our expectations. Most of the people believe that they use social media for checking news. Some people use social media to make new friends, and few people use social media for shopping purposes.  As per our survey results, 165 people use social media for checking news, 55 people use for making friends, and others use it for shopping purposes.  We also got some comments about this question about whether social media is used to express opinions or for other purposes. Only 5-10 people commented that we use social media for other purposes. 

Facebook posts people’s old posts or memories after one year or more than one years.  We hypothesized that people might like when Facebook posts their old posts or memories. As per our survey results, more than 50 percent of people like it when Facebook posts their memories or old posts.  Almost 30 percentage of people said that they do not like it when Facebook posts their memories or old posts.  Other people were not sure about such activities of Facebook.  This question was answered by majority of the people we surveyed for our academic writing research project.

In addition to that, we hypothesized that students do not agree to using social media during the classes. According to our survey results, more than 60 percent of people said that they try to avoid using social media during the class hours.  Among them some people commented that use of social media hinders their concentration on the instructor’s lectures.  Some people (less than 6 percent) thought that the use of social media does not have a bad impact on the classes.  Also, some people said that it is bad to use social media in the classes, but they do it in the classes, and only 50 people believed that it is okay to use social media during the classes. Some people verbally told us that they use social media when they do not understand the instructor’s lectures.  However, people sometimes blame the instructors for their own lack of concentrations in the classes.  It might be another reason that parents push their children to study such things that children do not like, and children are unwilling to concentrate the class.

Discussions

We tried our best to collect information from the Texas Tech community about impact of social media on the society.  We surveyed about 300 people out of 33,000 people of the Texas Tech University community. This number might not reflect a good representation of the TTU community.  We mostly surveyed people from the Student Union Building and Library.  We might not also have gotten information from all academic departments of the TTU community.  Therefore, our informants were not good representations in academic department distribution.  Our survey informers were mostly undergraduates. Therefore, our survey might be more representative of undergraduates than others. The graduate students were much fewer than undergraduate students. Therefore, our survey may not reflect a good representation of the graduate students at TTU community. Also, we surveyed few faculty/staff. Thus, our survey might not reflect a good representation of the faculty/stuff of the TTU community.    

We hypothesized that people use social media to change the society by sharing news, films, and awareness activities, and we found that a high number of people of the TTU community believe that social media might be used to change the society by sharing news, films, and awareness activities.  People might have believed this hypothesis because in this modern time people use social media to get news and other social activities. Also, in this time, it is very easy to get news by social media. Some people did not agree to this hypothesis.  There might be a lot of reasons for such disagreement. Those people might think that they may get completely wrong news when some people share wrong news in social media deliberately. Also, they may think that social media is for only making friends, and it is not for changing the society. Some of the people were confused to give their opinion about the use of social media for making social changes.  Those people might think that it may be true for some cases and for some other cases it might not contribute at all to changing the society.  For example, they might think some young people waste a lot of time using social media without doing their own work.  In those cases, use of social media might impart a bad impact on those people.  On the other hand, they might think that social media might contribute to changing the society by sharing news, because people get news easily by using social media.

We hypothesized that females compromise their personal privacy due to the use of personal information in social media; however, we found that most of the females of the TTU community believed that compromise of personal privacy depends on how they use social media. They may think that social media has an option to hide personal information.  Therefore, people can use this option of social media to use their personal information and hide that information so that only they can only see that information.  Some females were concerned about use of personal information in social media.  They might think that in some cases social media accounts may be hacked by others.  In those cases, the personal privacy may be hampered even though they use the privacy option of social media to hide their personal information.  Most the males of the TTU community were not concerned about the use of personal information in social media, and they thought it was okay to use personal information in social media.

We hypothesized that people use social media to express their opinions, but we found that the TTU community believe that they use social media for different purposes. The TTU community use social media for checking news, making friends, and shopping.  The reason to use social media for the above purposes is that people use social media for enjoyment purposes.  We found people use social media for shopping purposes because most of the sellers give advertisements about their products in the social media.  Therefore, it is very easy to get a lot of information about different products in the social media.  People use social media to make friends because it is easy to communicate with friends in the social media.

Most people like when Facebook shares their old posts or memories. Nowadays, people want to have more information with the least amount of work.  People do not need to remember their old posts because Facebook shares their old posts.  Some people were not concerned about this issue.  They said that it is just okay because they are not enjoying such activities.  Some people might not like these activities of Facebook because Facebook might post bad memories of those people.  Finally, it might be true that people like such activities of Facebook because people usually post the good stuff in Facebook, and therefore they might enjoy it when Facebook posts their previous good stuff.  

We also premised that most of the TTU community do not agree to using social media during the classes, and we found that most of the TTU community try to avoid using social media during the classes.  People might think that the use of social media during the classes hampers their concentration to concentrate the instructor’s lectures.  Some people said that it is okay to use social media during the classes because they might think that the use of social media does not restrain their ability to concentrate on the class.  Some people might use social media during the classes when they become unable to understand the lecture’s contents.  They might think using social media may help them to spend class time instead of listening to the instructors.   

Conclusions

Our group got information from the informants about the impact of social media on the TTU community.  We surveyed about 300 people out of 33,000 people of the Texas Tech University (TTU) community.  Our informants were interested to complete this survey.  In our survey, it was found that TTU community believed that social media can be used to change the society.  The females of the TTU community thought that use of personal information might not hamper their personal privacy.  The TTU community used social media for making friends, checking news, and shopping.  Most of the TTU community like Facebook activities when Facebook posts their memories.  Finally, it was found that the TTU community tries to avoid using social media during the classes.

Our results are not a good representation of the TTU community, because our survey was not a good representation of all departments of Texas Tech university, graduate students, and TTU faculty/staff.  Another serious limitation of our survey is that we only surveyed about 300 people out of 33,000 people of the Texas Tech University (TTU) community.  The higher number of people included in the survey, higher the accuracy in the survey results. Moreover, some of our survey questions were not good enough to get information from the informants.  It might have some confusions to the informants.  Also, in our survey, we had less number of opinion questions.  For getting clear information, the opinion questions play an important role.  It is usual to make survey questions as clear as possible to get clear information from the informants. In addition to that, our survey results are limited to the Texas Tech Community.  Therefore, our survey results might not be good representative to other communities in the United States.  However, our survey results might have some contributions to other communities because university communities have some similarities things.

Our survey might be a good representation of the TTU community once we had majority of the TTU community included in our survey.  Our survey results may also be good if we surveyed all departments of Texas Tech University.  In the future, the survey results might be made representative of TTU community by doing the survey randomly at all locations of the TTU community.  In that case, the majority of the TTU community should be included in the survey.  Also, our survey results might be used universally by doing survey in different university communities in the United Sates.  In future, we try to get information form as much as people possible from Texas Tech Community as well as from other communities in the United Sates to use survey results universally.  Also, we will make survey questions as clear as possible to get clear idea from the informants.

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Appendix A: Social Media Survey Questions

Thank you for filling out our survey!   (Social Media, Parental Leave, Black Lives Matter)

Demographic Questions:

1.     ___ Undergraduate   ____Graduate    ____ Faculty/Staff/Other

2.     ___ Male      ____Female

3.     Age ____ 18-22      ____ 23-28     ____ 29 or more

4.     Where are you from, originally?   ___ Texas    ___ USA, not TX      ___international

5.     Do you have a child/children? ___ Yes     ___ No

Survey Questions on Social Media

1- Do you use social media as a tool for social change? For example, sharing news, film, or an article that you think is important for promoting social awareness regarding an issue? 

___ Often      ___ Sometimes  ___ Rarely      ____ Never     ___ N/A don’t know

2- How much do you think social media helps you to have a dialogue with the people you don't know? ___ meet a lot of people I didn’t know            ___ sometimes    ___ doesn’t help/rarely   ___ N/A

3- Do you think social media has a positive impact on your social life or a negative impact?

___ positive    ____ negative    ____ N/A, not sure, no impact       Why? 

4. How long do you use social media each day?

____ > 4 hrs/day        ___ >2 hrs/day           ____>1 hr/day            ____ >1/2 hr/day     ____ <1/2 hr/day

5. If you were allowed to use only one social media application what would it be?                                 

___ Facebook    ___ Snapchat     ___ LinkedIn    ___ Instagram      ___Twitter       ___ Any other      ____________

6.     What is the social media tool you most frequently use every day?                                                               ___ Facebook        ___ Instagram   ___ Twitter     ___ other: __________________________________

7.  What is your passion for using social media applications?                                                                        

 ___ Checking news      ___ Making new friends      ___ Shopping    ___ Other: _______________________

8. Are you worried about personal privacy being compromised in social media?      

 ___ Yes   ___ No      ___ A little

9. Should the government take to protect the personal privacy in social media?              

___ Yes   ___ No       ___ It depends

10. Do “likes” or lack of them alter your mood?   ___ Yes    ___ No     ___ Not sure   ___ N/A, Never use

11. When reading posts on social media, would you rather use simple “likes” and facial expressions to give posters feedback instead of detailed feelings and comments?

___ Yes    ___ No   ___ It depends    N/A, Never use social media

12. When socializing online, do you find memories are easier to recall when social media posts previous photos and events?        ___ Yes    ___ No    ___  N/A, Never use social media

13. Do you like it when Facebook posts my “memories” or old posts.  ___ Yes   ___ No  ___ not sure/NA

14. Do you think posting violent scenarios in social media sites is controlled enough?

___ Yes     ____ No      _____ Not sure/N/A

15. What is your opinion about using social media during the class for non-class purposes? (choose the best)        ___ always do         ___ do & think it’s ok ___ do but it’s bad            ___ try to avoid it

16. Do you think social media can be helpful for better studies?    ___ Yes     ____ No

If yes, how does it help?

17. Do you use social media to help you remember things to do every day? ___ Yes   ___ No

18. How do you respond to conflicts in social media?   __ Avoid   ___ Stir up  ___ Work for peace