Student Facebook use under scrutiny
12 July 2012
Spending time updating your status on Facebook could be doing more than just keeping you in touch with your friends.
UC psychology master's student Milesa Cepe is investigating student Facebook use.
Spending time updating your status on Facebook could be doing more than just keeping you in touch with your friends.
University of Canterbury master’s student Milesa Cepe is keen to find out if using Facebook is also having an impact on the academic achievement of high school and university students.
The psychology student plans to investigate whether the social networking site is distracting students from their studies, or if students who use Facebook are prone to distraction anyway. She also wants to find out if there is also any relationship between academic achievement and parenting styles, and is investigating whether students use Facebook to procrastinate from their studies.
“I am also measuring how these students perform on a procrastination scale – are these students more susceptible to procrastinate? Or is Facebook making the students procrastinate?”
Milesa said there was some debate as to whether or not to ban Facebook from educational institutions.
“So I’m hoping my research will contribute information to the wider discussion about the site. There has been little research on its effects on academic achievement and, what little there has been, is limited to studies on university students rather than high school students. I plan to compare the effects on both age groups,” she said.
Milesa, who confesses to being a moderate Facebook user herself, said she will study two groups – 16-17 year old high school students and 18-21 year old university students. Those taking part in the study will fill in an online survey that will be accessed through a Facebook group specifically for participants. They will also be asked to get their parents to fill in another survey that will be used to measure parenting styles – whether they are authoritarian, authoritative or permissive – to see if these styles are linked to the educational outcomes of their children.
“I’m also talking to four New Zealand universities to find out how much Facebook is hit each day within a specific time period. This will give me an idea of how much students use Facebook during university time.”
Milesa’s research is being supervised by Dr Verena Pritchard (Psychology) and Adjunct Professor Kim Dolgin (Educational Studies and Human Development).
For more information please contact:
communications@canterbury.ac.nz
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