How does social media affect college students?

EDT180C Group C3

Marysol Martinez, Andrea Aprile, Madison Tavis

Gary Lewallen

April 17, 2019

 How does Social Media Affect College Students Group C3

The topic that we decided to research is how social media can affect college students.

Being college students and being avid users of social media brought us to dig deeper and figure

out if social media was affecting not only us but other college students. We asked two questions

to gain knowledge on the audience that was responding, these were gender and school year

questions. The following five questions were all in regard to how much time students were

spending on their phone, did they sleep their phone next to them, did social media affect their

sleep, did it affect their studying time and what social media app they found themselves using the

most. In order to collect the data, we created a survey on Google Forms and were able to receive

ninety responses.

The first question was “What year are you?”, this question was in a multiple-choice

format with six options: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, graduate and post-bacc. When

looking at the results, 57.8% of respondents are freshmen, 22.2% are sophomores, 14.4% were

juniors and about 5% were in the senior and graduate category with no students in the post-bacc

category. These results show that out of the 90 respondents only 1 of them was a graduate

student and only four of them were seniors. The majority of the responses were freshmen and

sophomores, with around 30 more freshmen than sophomores. It is important to keep this in

mind when reviewing the other results as these are first- and second-year students in comparison

to students that have spent more time in college.

2
 How does Social Media Affect College Students Group C3

The second question that was asked was “What is your gender?”, this was also given as a

multiple-choice option with the options of Male, Female and Other. 75.6% of respondents were

females and 24.4% of respondents were males, there were no respondents that categorized

themselves as other. Due to having most of respondents classify themselves as female, we

decided to look at the direct impact of social media and differentiate between male and females.

3
 How does Social Media Affect College Students Group C3

The first question we asked relating to social media usage was “Does social media

interfere with your study time?”, in the chart we are comparing the overall answers and then the

difference between males and females. This question was a multiple-choice question with the

ability to choose that social media did affect study time and that it didn’t. Overall there were 69

people that responded saying that social media did affect their study time. Out of these

respondents 51 of them were females and 18 were males. There were 21 respondents that said

social media did not affect their studying time. Out of these respondents 16 of them were females

and 4 of them were males.

The second question was “Does social media affect your sleep?”, we wanted to

specifically ask this question as it is well known that the loss of sleep can not only affect

academics but health and mental health as well. Out of all of the respondents, 62 of them said

that social media affected their sleep time and 27 of them reported that social media did not

affect their sleep. Out of the 62 that said it did affect them, 46 of them were females and 16 were

males. Out of the respondents that said that social media didn’t affect their sleep 21 of them were

female and 6 were males.

4
 How does Social Media Affect College Students Group C3

Another question that was asked was “How much time do you spend on your phone?”,

this question was given in a multiple-choice option with the options being ranges of hours

ranging from 0-1, 2-3, 4-5, 6-8 hours and more than 8 hours respectively. 2 students responded

that they spent 0-1 hours, 26 students responded that they spent 2-3 hours on their phone, 37

responded that they spent 4-5 hours, 18 students spent 6-8 hours on their phone and 7 students

spent more than 8 hours on their phone. It is shown that 4-8 hours held the greatest number of

students.

5
 How does Social Media Affect College Students Group C3

The next question that was asked was “Do you sleep with your phone next to you?”, this was

given as a multiple-choice question with the responses either being yes, no or sometimes. Out of

90 respondents 63 students answered that they did sleep with their phone next to them, 13

students answered that they did not sleep with their phone next to them, and 13 responded that

they sometimes slept with their phone next to them. Out of the 63 students that responded yes, 51

one them were females and 12 of them were males. The students that responded no consisted of

10 females and 3 males. The students that responded sometimes consisted of 6 females and 7

males.

The last question that was asked was different from the other question due to format. It

was a free response question and students had to type in their answer. The question was “Which

social media app do you spend the most time on?”. This gave us many results however

respectively the most used app was Instagram with 26 students, 20 students responded with

Snapchat, 18 students responded with Twitter, 8 students responded with Youtube, 5 students

responded with Reddit, 7 students responded with Facebook, 4 students responded with none,

and one student responded with Pinterest. The students that responded Instagram consisted of 19

6
 How does Social Media Affect College Students Group C3

females and 7 males. Snapchat respondents consisted of 15 females and 5 males. Twitter

respondents consisted of 15 females and 3 males. Youtube respondents consisted of 7 females

and 1 male. Reddit respondents consisted of 4 females and 1 male. Facebook respondents

consisted of 5 females and 2 males. Students that responded with none consisted of 2 females

and 2 males. The student that responded that they used Pinterest the most was a male.

After analyzing the charts and the data that we received from the Google Form we came

to the conclusion that overall social media affects college students specifically in the time that is

used on social media. As the charts shows, there are very few students that don’t spend time on

social media and the majority of students answered that social media affects their academics and

their sleeping habits. Not only may their academics be compromised but their overall physical

and mental health is compromised, all due to the use of social media. After reviewing the

questions asked we thought that perhaps giving students a multiple choice answer for which

social media app they used the most would give us more accurate results. It was hard to

understand the data because the spelling of some apps was incorrect or differentiated with

capitalizing certain letters. This made the data more tedious to decipher as we had to fix some

answer in order to categorize them correctly. If we were to conduct another research project like

7
 How does Social Media Affect College Students Group C3

this one it would be imperative to make sure all questions and answers are in a simple format

thus making the retrieval of data easier.