A Tale of Two Studies: Facebook Use and Grades

When IPR communication studies researcher Eszter Hargittai read the recent headlines blaming the online networking site Facebook for lowering grades of college users, she was immediately suspicious of the report. The authors of that study, including Ohio State education doctoral student Aryn Karpinski, had acknowledged some of the limitations—including the small number of Ohio State students in the sample—but for the most part, the resulting deluge of news stories had not.

So Hargittai and her colleagues took aim to correct some of the methodological flaws in that original study and test their skepticism of the results. In order to compare Facebook use and GPA among adolescents and college students, they analyzed data in three different contexts: a representative, cross-sectional sample of first–year students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a representative sample of 14– to 22–year–olds, and a longitudinal panel of nationally representative American youth aged 14–23. Data from the latter two sets were collected as part of the annual National Annenberg Survey of Youth conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Adolescent Risk Communication Institute. In all three cases, the researchers were able to isolate current use of Facebook, distinct from other recreational online habits and social networking sites.

“None of the three studies detect a robust negative relationship between grade point averages and use of Facebook,” their paper concluded. In fact, the third study picked up on slightly higher rates of Facebook use among students with higher grades.

"It is important to use rigorous research design when studying the social implications of digital media since we know so little about these topics," Hargittai said. "The press often jumps on findings without much scrutiny of a research project's quality." But perhaps more problematic, Hargittai continued, would be for institutions to adopt policies—such as limiting students' Internet uses—based on data drawn from methodologically flawed studies.

Click here to see the research paper.

Hargittai is associate professor of communication studies and an IPR faculty associate.
Click here for more information on her research.