Background

Researchers at Miriam Hospital’s Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine conducted a study similar to the study we will be conducting.  Researchers focused on a sample of 483 first-year female college students from one college in the northeastern U.S.  Researchers chose to focus on only females because they said there is a big difference in type of media used and time spent using media based on gender.  Females were found to spend more time using media.  Women tended to make phone calls, text, listen to music, read, use social networking, while men tended to use video games, newspapers and computers.Times spent using media could overlap.  For example, a student could be using a computer while simultaneously texting on their cell phone.  

 

• This study, after completion, concluded that social media has a negative effect on GPA.  The researchers reasoned though that cell phone use and social networking may be used more during the school year for college students to stay in touch with friends and family.  This relates to the study we will be conducting because we are looking for a correlation between social media use and GPA.  We will be using high school students instead of college students however.  The article I found was not the actual study, it was more of a synopsis of the study but where the study could be found was listed in the article.  I found a study from the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire did a study very similar to the one we will be conducting. The study was conducted on the campus in order to determine the correlation between heavy usage of social media and its affect on their grades. The study also wanted to look at how much time students use social media and if the usage increased over time. About 1,127 students were surveyed at the college. The research shows that there isn’t a correlation between the amount of time students spend on social media sites and the grades they were receiving. They also found that grades followed very similar distributions at other colleges, and the majority of the students received A’s and B’s.

 The study also found that more students use Facebook and Youtube more than any other social media or online sites. Things such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs and Myspace had a significantly lower amount of users and accounts on them. On top of these findings, they also found that the business school had the highest percentage of users of blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn where as people studying liberal arts were the highest percentage of Myspace users.

For the study, they decided that light use was considered about 31 minutes or less per day, and heavy usage was determined as usage exceeding 61 minutes a day. Researchers defined high grades A’s and B’s and lower grades as B’s and lower. For the purpose of their study, social media was determined to be Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn.

There was no correlation determined by the study between heavy social media usage and grades since there was no significant difference in grades between the students considered as heavy users and those who were considered light users.

There were a decent amount of other studies on this topic and I believe that this one was a very reliable study and that our results will be similar to the results they found.