Method
Participants
The participants in this sample were LaGrange College
undergraduate day students that volunteered. The total sample was 199
students. 110 of these participants were female and 89 were male. Of the
participants 68 were freshman, 48 were seniors, 42 were juniors and 41 were
seniors. All participants were treated ethically according to the APA Ethical
Code (American Psychological Association, 2002).
Materials
Each of the participants was given a copy of a questionnaire that
was written specifically for this study. To see the questionnaire in full, see
Appendix A.
Procedure
The participants were recruited based on their location on campus.
The students were recruited if they were present in the cafeteria at lunchtime
or if they were in the library from the hours of 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. They were
asked to fill out the questionnaire honestly and return it to the researcher
when finished.
Results
The measurement for this study was based on a Likert scale. All
possible responses were assigned a numerical value. The opinion items
were ranked with “strongly agree” being the lowest value and “strongly
disagree” being the highest value. The coded items can be found in
Appendix A. The items were then compared with each other using
correlation coefficients. All results that were found significant at the .01 level
are reported and found in Table 1. The items in Table 1 that are bold faced
are the correlates that are of particular interest and pertain directly to the
hypothesis of this study. By far, the most interesting statistical analysis is
the correlation between time spent on Facebook and GPA. This shows that
the more time people spend on Facebook the lower their GPA seems to be.
Another interesting find is that the correlation for both application use and
chat use show a high correlation of .5 with the time spent on Facebook. This
means that the way a person uses Facebook could be the factor that causes
the distractions and not necessarily Facebook as a whole.
Another factor that shows up in this data is the relationship between
the four following variables: importance of a social life, importance of
Facebook on a social life, social interaction from Facebook, and the feeling
of being left out when not logged into Facebook. From the correlates
presented in Table 1 it would seem that if a person believes that a social life
is important to the college experience then the more important Facebook is
to that social life. Since students tend to believe that Facebook is a part of
their social life, they are more likely to believe that a good amount of social
interaction can come from Facebook. This leads to the person feeling left out
when not logged in to Facebook. The overall trend of the data show that the
more a student feels that Facebook is related to the social aspect of college
then the more time that student will spend on Facebook and utilizes all
of the most distracting ways to use Facebook and this in turn leads to
students spending more time on Facebook. Since more time on Facebook
is correlated negatively with GPA it is likely that this student will have a
lower than average GPA.