Scientific process and methodology

¶ … Kalpidou Costin and Morris (2011) use standard social-science methodology to correlate Facebook use among college students with measures of self-esteem and adaptation to college life. Facebook use was measured according to a survey devised by Kalpidou Costin and Morris, rating emotional and social connection to Facebook, but also according to the number of hours spent on the website, and the number of "friends" on the site. The survey population deliberately included a mix of first-year college students and upper-class students, on the basis that the latter would have an "established social network" already (184). They found that a larger number of Facebook friends was related to poor academic adjustment in college, but worse for the first-year students. The academic adjustment also correlated with poor emotional adjustment, suggesting that "Facebook use, like Internet use, does not fulfill emotional needs" (187). They also discovered that the amount of time spent on Facebook does not correlate with these adjustment scores, even though the number of friends does. Yet among the older students, better social adjustment scores were associated with a larger number of Facebook friends -- suggesting, in the words of Kalpidou Costin and Morris, that "upper-class students use Facebook more effectively than first-year students do." This would be a matter of the first-year students using Facebook to compensate for the stress of adjusting to a new environment (and finding that Facebook does not offer much emotional assistance) while the older students are using Facebook to bolster the experience of an "established social network" in real life. This seems to support their additional finding that the older student group also reported greater "attachment to the institution" (188). Part of the older students' more effective use of Facebook consists of more effectively strengthening online the social connections that existed in real life.

The chief flaw in the methodology employed by Kalpidou Costin and Morris is in the sample population. They used "70 undergraduate" students as a basis for their sample, of whom "67%" were female. In other words, the study consisted of 47 women and 23 men. In a study of social behavior, to have a sample population where the ratio of women to men is 2:1 seems downright bizarre. To permit this requires several assumptions, which would have to be dealt with scientifically before the scientific pretensions of this study could be addressed. Do women measure self-esteem differently from men? (As one example, anorexia nervosa is a psychiatric disorder which profoundly affects self-esteem, while only an estimated 5 to 15% of those with anorexia nervosa are male.) Does women's social behavior differ markedly from men? And most saliently, what is the gender proportion of Facebook users overall? (As it turns out, a March 2011 estimate said that a slight majority of Facebook users were male