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Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.comto accumulate “friends,†compare movie preferences, share videos andexchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students havebecome the subjects of academic research.
To study howpersonal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of socialrelationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits andvalues), a team of researchers from Harvardand the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring theFacebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, whichthey declined to name because it could compromise the integrity oftheir research.
“One of the holy grails of social science isthe degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendshipdetermines taste,†said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor ofsociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of afeather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?â€
Inother words, Facebook — where users rate one another as “hot or not,â€play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas†and throw virtual sheep at oneanother — is helping scholars explore fundamental social sciencequestions.
“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing socialscience,†said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor whois also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of thekind of data we now have.â€
Facebook’s network of 58 millionactive users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site inthe United States have made it an irresistible subject for many typesof academic research.
Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.
Butit is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences —sociology, psychology and political science — that particularly excitessome scholars, because the site lets them examine how people,especially young people, are connected to one another, something fewdata sets offer, the scholars say.
Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texasand other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theoriesin their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity,collective action, race and political engagement.
Much of theresearch is continuing and has not been published, so findings arepreliminary. In a few studies, the Facebook users do not know they arebeing examined. A spokeswoman for Facebook says the site has no policyprohibiting scholars from studying profiles of users who have notactivated certain privacy settings.
“For studying young adults,â€said Vincent Roscigno, an editor of The American Sociological Review,“Facebook is the key site of the moment.â€
Eliot R. Smith, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, and a colleague received a grant from the National Science Foundationto study how people meet and learn more about potential romanticpartners. “Facebook was attractive to us because it has both thosekinds of information,†Professor Smith said.
S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State,has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. Oneinvolved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learnedthat while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends aspopular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “toomany†friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.
In “TheBenefits of Facebook ‘Friends,’†a paper this year in The Journal ofComputer-Mediated Communication, Nicole Ellison, an assistant professorat Michigan State University,and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact onstudents’ well-being. (Note to parents: in an earlier paper theresearchers found no correlation between grade-point average andintensity of Facebook use.)
An important finding, Ms. Ellisonsaid, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and lowself-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form ofsocial capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.†A weak tieis a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend orfamily member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because theyare likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunitiesthat they might not get from close friends and family. “With closefriends and family we’ve already shared information,†Ms. Ellison said.
Ms. Ellison and her colleagues suggest the information gleanedfrom Facebook may be more accurate than personal information offeredelsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because Facebook islargely based in real-world relationships that originate in confinedcommunities like campuses.
Mr. Sundar of Penn State agreed. “You cannot keep it fake for that long,†he said. “It’s not a Match.com. You don’t make an impression and then hook somebody.â€
Butsome scholars point out that Facebook is not representative of theethnicity, educational background or income of the population at large,and its membership is self-selecting, so there are limits to researchusing the site. Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found ina study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to useFacebook, and much more likely to use MySpace.White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were muchmore likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to useMySpace.
Facebook began in 2004 at Harvard and was restricted to studentsuntil 2006. As Ms. Hargittai points out in her paper, “Requiring suchan affiliation clearly limited the number and types of people who couldsign up for the service in the beginning.â€
Most researchersacknowledge these limits, yet they are still eager to plumb the site’svast amount of data. The site’s users have mixed feelings about beingput under the microscope. Katherine Kimmel, 22, a graduate student atthe University of Cincinnati,said she found it “fascinating that professors are using something thatstarted solely as a fun social networking tool for entertainment,†andshe suggested yet another study: how people fill out Facebook’s“relationship status†box. “You’re not really dating until you put iton Facebook,†she said.
But Derrick B. Clifton, 19, a student atPomona College in California, said, “I don’t feel like academicresearch has a place on a Web site like Facebook.†He added that if itwas going to happen, professors should ask students’ permission.
Althoughfederal rules govern academic study of human subjects, universities,which approve professors’ research methods, have differentinterpretations of the guidelines. “The rules were made for a differentworld, a pre-Facebook world,†said Samuel D. Gosling, an associateprofessor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who usesFacebook to explore perception and identity. “There is a rule that youare allowed to observe public behavior, but it’s not clear if onlinebehavior is public or not.â€
Indiana University appears to haveone of the stricter policies. Its Web site states that the universitywill not approve academic research without permission from socialnetworking sites or specific individuals.
Professor Hargittaiof Northwestern conducted her Facebook study through a writing coursethat is required of all students at the University of Illinois,Chicago. Some 1,060 participants answered survey questions on paper.Professor Ellison of Michigan State used a random sample of 800undergraduates who were invited to participate via an e-mail messagethat included a link to an online survey.
Dr. Christakis ofHarvard said he and his colleagues were studying the profiles of theEast Coast college class with the approval of Harvard’s InstitutionalReview Board, and with the knowledge of the unnamed college’sadministration — but unknown to the students being studied.
“Employersare looking at people’s online postings and Googling information aboutthem, and I think researchers are right behind them,†said Dr.Christakis, a sociologist and internist who was an author of a studythat received wide attention this year for its suggestion that obesityis “socially contagious.†(The researchers did not use Facebook.)
Amongother topics, the Harvard-U.C.L.A. researchers are investigating aconcept, first put forth by the pioneering German sociologist GeorgSimmel, known as triadic closure: whether one’s friends are alsofriends of one another. If this seems trivial, consider that a study in2004 in The American Journal of Public Health suggested that adolescentgirls who are socially isolated and whose friends are not friends withone another experienced more suicidal thoughts.
“Triadicclosure was first described by Simmel 100 years ago,†Dr. Christakissaid. “He just theorizes about it 100 years ago, but he didn’t have thedata. Now we can engage that data.â€
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