Procedure
The research study was executed in several steps. First, the researchers developed a 25 question survey and optional content analysis on the website SharePoint. Next, they created an event invitation on Facebook asking users to take part in the survey, with a description of the research study and a link to the SharePoint site. The invitation was distributed to the researchers’ friends on Facebook. The researchers also sent an e-mail out to freshmen and sophomore students at King’s College inviting them to participate. The survey was open to the public for two weeks, and the event invitation was taken down from Facebook when that time period had ended.
The survey results were analyzed as a whole for significant descriptive statistics. Next, the responses of the participants who chose to take part in the optional content analysis were pulled to be further examined. The researchers utilized respondents’ personal Facebook identification numbers to view their profiles and evaluate their privacy settings from the perspective of someone who was not Facebook friends with them, but had at least one friend in common. These findings were compared to the participants’ responses to survey questions 23, 24, and 25, asking the users what they believed their privacy settings were for their profile pictures album, their wall, and their hometown and/or current city information. This comparison determined whether or not users were truly aware of their current personal privacy settings. These findings were then evaluated against participants’ responses to question 21, “When Facebook changes its privacy policies every so often and notifies you at the top of your homepage, do you take the time to investigate what has changed?” The categorical data was then analyzed descriptively, as well as inferentially by means of a chi-square statistic.