Facebook Use Not Found To Correlate Negatively With College Grades, New Study Shows

Eszter Hargittai debunks recent ‘research’ that purported to find a relationship between Facebook use and loweer grades in college students:

Attempts by researchers to replicate the results of the widely publicized preliminary Ohio State University study failed to find a robust relationship between use of the popular social networking site and diminished grades.

“We found no evidence that Facebook use correlates with lower academic achievement,” said Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University and a fellow this year at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The researchers used relevant information from three existing data sets — a sample of more than 1,000 undergraduates from the University of Illinois, Chicago; a nationally representative cross sectional sample of 14- to 22-year-olds; and a nationally representative longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14- to 23. They were unable to detect a significant negative relationship between grade point averages and Facebook use.