participants were recruited through invitations to Facebook events that were created by
the researchers, through campus-wide emails distributed to students,
faculty, and staff at a liberal arts college in the American Midwest,
and through the ‘‘Social Psychology Network’’ website.
Volunteers were encouraged to forward the link to the online survey
to their friends and acquaintances. A brief description of the
study and a link to the survey were posted on the invitation page.
Seven participants were excluded either because they were not
old enough or because they were not Facebook users. This resulted
in a final sample of 1,026 Facebook users (284 male and 735 female)
ranging in age from 18 to 79 with a mean age of 30.24 (SD = 11.99).
There were participants from 54 different nations ranging alphabetically
from Argentina to Zimbabwe, but the only countries that
had more than 10 participants were Germany, South Korea, the United
Kingdom, and the United States (by far the largest group). 390 of
our subjects were college students (38%), 618 were not college students
(60.2%), and 18 did not report their student status (1.8%).