Unit Structures: Student Life on the Facebook

Student Life on the Facebook
Posted 1/08/2006 02:20:00 PM |

Over the course of the last semester, I have been analyzing the behavior of UNC-Chapel Hill students in social network communities. In case you're not quite sure what social network communities (SNC's) are, they are services like MySpace, Friendster, Orkut and Facebook. I am particularly interested in Facebook, primarily because it is so heavily used on campus. In a previous study, I found that 88 percent of freshmen on the UNC campus had active Facebook accounts. As one might imagine, any service that reaches 88 percent of our freshmen is worth trying to understand, so I devised a system to sample the Facebook on one week increments. In this post (which will be long, and is available for download as a white paper - pdf), I'll explore some of my findings, share interesting data and trends, and provide some of my personal opinion on this Facebook phenomenon.

I hope that this post will be of use to students, faculty and administrators, as well as the general public as they attempt to understand the Facebook particularly, and SNC's more generally. As with any new phenomenon that affects our life, we have many questions and search for answers; I hope to help get a discussion rolling. In the sense that this post may help at-stake participants better understand the service and its uses, I hope that it is beneficial to all.

First, a word about my methodology. For each week, all students that self-identified as undergraduates, class of 2009, were sampled. This means their profiles were inspected, and data elements were analyzed. There is no way to "prove" that the students who self-identity as freshmen are actually freshmen, so the data is limited in this sense. Second, it should be noted that when I talk about the behavior of "freshmen", I am referring to the behavior of freshmen in the Facebook. I will refer to my population as "freshmen", but I make no claim of knowledge of freshmen behavior outside the Facebook context. (Update - The margin of error if these findings were to be generalized to all freshmen at the university, would be as follows: the first week of the semester is +/- .74%, and at the last week is +/- .54%)

Additionally, as with any large scale sample, there may be data imperfections due to technical difficulties encountered during the sampling process. However, I feel confident that any data imperfections would be covered under a reasonable margin of error. I must also state that while the Facebook's terms of service prohibit the copying of data from the Facebook to a third-party, I am claiming fair use of the aggregate data that you will see here. Other than "adoption" data, which is well-known already, none of the data here deals with the Facebook, only with how students use it. It is my goal to understand how students share information in SNC's, and the Facebook provides my vector.

To begin, we will look at adoption trends in the Facebook. One of the thing that surprised me is that on the first day of school, 3193 freshmen reportedly had an account. This was over 85% of the entire freshman class, and many had been using the Facebook for many months. As it turns out, the months of June and July represent the greatest months of Facebook account creation.

Click on image to see larger version

If we were to turn this data into a logistic S-curve, we would see a very characteristic adoption curve. To sign up with the Facebook, one needs a university email address to log in. When I compared my new account data to the dates of UNC's orientations (held mainly during the months of June and July), I saw strong, direct correlations between orientation and account creation. Generally, the two days following orientation would represent a 200-500% percent increase of average daily account creation for the month. It became obvious that many students learned of the Facebook at orientation, most likely virally through friends, though it is also quite possible they learned of the service through semi-official means such as orientation leaders. Due to this, the students joined the site early, and were already comfortable users when school started.

Next, we will look at how use of the Facebook grew over the course of the semester. As I previously stated, on the first day of classes, 85% of freshmen had a Facebook account. Over the course of the semester, that number grew until over 94% of freshmen had a Facebook account. In the chart, we will look at how that trend, as well as examining the use of privacy in the Facebook.

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The blue line represents total accounts, and the pink line reflects total accounts that are not private, meaning anyone with a UNC Facebook account can view that profile. As the semester passed, students protecting their profile grew from 3.2% to 4.75%. It should be noted that these total account numbers represent a revision upward from my previous blog posting; the methodology has been revised in this analysis and is correct.

While the actual number of nodes (the freshmen) in the network did not grow substantially over the course of the semester, the number of edges (friendship connections) in the network did expand remarkably. As the freshmen made friends over the course of the semester, their social network size grew from 144,319 to 373,651 connections. The average number of friends a freshman on the Facebook had on day one was 46, and at the end of the semester, he or she had 111 friends. This might give us a picture of how many friends a freshman might make the first semester of college: 65.

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Of course, these 65 new friends can make an impact on the lives of freshmen. As the freshmen seek to stake out their identities, do they change dramatically over the course of the semester? The Facebook allows users to list their political orientation, which serves as, in my opinion, a very strong indicator of identity. One can orient an entire social experience around the philosophy of politics.

We all know that freshmen change dramatically in their first semester at college. However, I felt it might be interesting to see if they shift their political orientation in their first semester. Does college make Liberals even more Liberal? Does college make Conservatives more Liberal? These are spectrum questions, of course, and we all shift as we learn, but as it turns out, freshmen do not shift their political orientation during their first semester at college.

Click on image to see larger version

In the graph above, the political orientation of campus is presented as a moving ratio. As you can see, over the course of the semester, the number of students identifying as Liberal decreases, and the number of students identifying as Conservative increases. This must be qualified, though. In the table below, which breaks out the exact percentages, you'll see that the movement is quite marginal. (Update - The number of freshmen who report a political orientation are a subset of all freshmen who use facebook; the margin of error at the first week of the study is +/- 1.04, and at the end of the semester is +/- .98. The margin of error if these findings were to be generalized to all freshmen at the university, would be as follows: the first week of the semester is +/- 1.28%, and at the last week is +/- 1.12%.)

Political Orientation	Campus Share, First Week	Campus Share, Last Week
Very Liberal	4.75%	5.0%
Liberal	33.58%	32.91%
Moderate	27.77%	26.78%
Conservative	26.46%	26.74%
Very Conservative	1.14%	.99%
Libertarian	1.39%	1.83%
Apathetic/Other	4.89%	5.73%

It should also be noted that this data has severe limitations. It does not actually reflect individual changes - if two students switch political identity from opposing parties, they cancel each other out in this estimate. This chart would only catch mass trends on campus (a liberalization, etc). I plan to explore this data in more detail later in this post, and in additional, follow-on postings.

In a previous study, I analyzed how much information students shared in SNC's (pdf). I extended this study to see how much information the students were sharing in the Facebook. Certain things, like name, school email, join and last update date are almost always shown. But what about optional identity information?

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In this graph, we see the percentage of freshmen sharing identity elements that I felt were interesting. It amazes me how much potentially sensitive information is openly shared. For example, you can find out the birthday, hometown, sexual orientation (indicated through a field labeled "interested in"), relationship status and political orientation of 3/4 or more of all students. Of course, there is no guarantee that any of this information is truthful - but in the eyes of employers or people who don't know you well, does that matter?

On the previous graph, you will also see Photo Albums - a handy and extremely well-done feature added by the Facebook towards the end of the semester. Nearly 45 percent of freshmen have Facebook photo albums, an adoption trend I find interesting. What was very interesting is that the Facebook allows you to tag your photos with the names of other people in the photos, and that allows your photo gallery to include not just pictures by you, but pictures of you by other people. In the following chart, the total number of persons shown in Facebook pictures is graphed. Please note, this is not a tally of all pictures, but of all pictures and tags. In just 8 weeks, the total number exploded from 9,783 to 78,413 - almost a nine-fold increase in volume, or an average of 23 pictures/tags a person!

Click on image to see larger version

As you see the trends, it becomes evident that Facebook is a very important part of a freshman's life. To that extent, I found that nearly 50% of all freshmen had updated their account in the last week, proving the service to be extremely sticky. Extending that time period to two weeks, greater than 67% of freshman had updated their profiles in that time period. The wall, which allows students to post public messages to each other, has 202,879 public messages to freshmen - or almost 60 per individual. Without question, the Facebook is an important resource for the freshmen, and it is used extremely often.

I'll conclude this report by indulging myself with some political demographic analysis. As we've seen, the Facebook allows students the ability to classify themselves by political orientation. I thought it might be neat to place the Liberal and Conservative bloc's next to each other, to see what I could find out.

The first thing I did was compare friend network sizes. I wanted to see who had more friends - liberals or conservatives. As it turns out, freshmen who are liberal have an average of 115.4 friends, while freshmen who are conservative have an average of 117.6 friends. The conservatives, it appears, are better at making friends than liberals by a 2.2 person margin!

Finally, I looked at some of the "favorites" of liberal and conservative freshmen. Facebook allows users the ability to list their favorite things - movies, music and books. I decided to compare the right and the left, so I conducted a little one-time pulse-like analysis of the student favorites. The results are below.

Favorite Books

Rank	Liberal	Conservative
1	Harry Potter	Bible
2	Catcher in the Rye	Harry Potter
3	The Great Gatsby	The Great Gatsby
4	1984	To Kill a Mockingbird
5	To Kill a Mockingbird	Da Vinci Code
6	Da Vinci Code	Pride and Prejudice
7	Pride and Prejudice	Angels and Demons
8	Siddhartha	Catcher in the Rye
9	The Giver	The Notebook
10	Angels and Demons	Lord of the Rings

Favorite Movies

Rank	Liberal	Conservative
1	Garden State	The Notebook
2	Fight Club	Anchorman
3	Donnie Darko	Wedding Crashers
4	Anchorman	Old School
5	Office Space	Gladiator
6	The Notebook	Dumb and Dumber
7	Wedding Crashers	Finding Nemo
8	Love Actually	Dirty Dancing
9	Pulp Fiction	Zoolander
10	Eternal Sunshine...	How to Lose a Guy...

Favorite Music

Rank	Liberal	Conservative
1	Coldplay	Jack Johnson
2	Jack Johnson	Coldplay
3	The Beatles	Rascal Flatts
4	The Killers	Kenny Chesney
5	Dave Matthews	The Killers
6	Bob Marley	Oar
7	The Shins	John Mayer
8	Modest Mouse	James Taylor
9	Radiohead	Switchfoot
10	Green Day	Tim McGraw

Take from these what you will - the inbound data is not especially clean, and while I made every effort (and they look right, for the most part), there's no guarantee these rankings are anywhere near perfect. What struck me about this data is that, for the most part, politics may divide us bitterly - but we actually share more in common than we might realize.

I'll conclude this report by reminding the reader that this data represents only a very small demographic - one class of freshmen at one university in the Southeastern United States. This is not meant to be a representative study of anything more than the exact population it studied, though I wouldn't be surprised if the use trends are similar across many, many campuses. It is important to note that this is not a study of the Facebook per se, but how students use social network services. It does not represent the Facebook as a part, or a whole. This is primarily a series of snapshots in time, showing how our freshmen use this extraordinarily successful service; hopefully from it the reader will take away a broader understanding.

Fred Stutzman is the author of this report and a Ph.D. student at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. His research interests involve social software and networks, personal identity management, information retrieval and knowledge discovery. He can be contacted at fred@metalab.unc.edu with questions or comments. This report is available for download as a white paper (pdf). Thanks to John Joseph Bachir, Terrell Russell, and Gary Marchionini for assistance proofing, editing and refining this document.

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32 Comments: (Post a Comment)

At January 10, 2006 12:38 AM, Anonymous said...: Interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing!
At January 10, 2006 1:08 AM, Anonymous said...: Very interesting.
At January 10, 2006 1:27 AM, stealbelow said...: Interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing!
At January 10, 2006 5:30 AM, Anonymous said...: Interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing!
At January 10, 2006 8:20 AM, Phil Renaud said...: wow! Excellent research, this is very telling and interesting! Thanks!
At January 10, 2006 9:00 AM, Jakob Lodwick said...: Thanks so much for putting this together. My favorite data were Bob Marley and 1984 appearing on the liberal top 10s, but not on the conservative. I guess it's obvious but I thought it was funny to see the data.
At January 10, 2006 10:06 AM, chris sivori said...: It's not surprising to me that the most extreme political viewpoints were underrepresented in Facebook usage, so it appears to me at a glance. Extremity of any sort is a relatively anti-social tendency.
At January 10, 2006 11:38 AM, Anonymous said...: What good use does this data have? Is this research?
At January 10, 2006 11:51 AM, Michael Greene said...: Interesting analysis. Thanks for sharing!
At January 10, 2006 5:15 PM, Reuben Grinberg said...: "This must be qualified, though. In the table below, which breaks out the exact percentages, you'll see that the movement is quite marginal, and the changes would generally fall under the margin-of-error."

Scientists have a standard way of dealing with problems like this: statistics. Is p < 0.05 when comparing the data at week 1 and the data at week 16?

"As it turns out, freshmen who are liberal have an average of 115.4 friends, while freshmen who are conservative have an average of 117.6 friends. The conservatives, it appears, are better at making friends than liberals by a 2.2 person margin!"

Again, this difference may be meaningless. You need to run the stats and tell us whether the differences are _significant_ (i.e. p < 0.05)
At January 10, 2006 7:12 PM, Fred Stutzman said...: Reuben - thanks for the feedback. I've followed up on your suggestions, and included margin of error. Though I state at the top of my post I am speaking only about my population, of which I have data for each entity, I absolutely agree with you that I should have included this data. I've done so, cleaned up my terminology a little, and pass along honest thanks.
At January 11, 2006 2:18 AM, Anonymous said...: This is really interesting. Have you ever thought about asking Facebook for the info? Course, you'd probably need something huge like SAS to run the observations. But luckily I know UNC has some SAS software sitting around somewhere that I'd assume you could use.

-Chris Cameron
Senior
Economics/Anthropology
DTH Opinion Editor
At January 11, 2006 2:23 AM, Anonymous said...: Also, just so you know, the DTH requires staff to not list their political affiliation unless they're on the opinion desk. I dunno how many freshmen we have, but that may explain why only 3/4 list political affiliation. I'd wager that despite my political leanings they're largely "liberal," too. And there may be more bias-causing agents out there.

-Chris Cameron
Senior
Economics/Anthropology
DTH Opinion Editor
At January 11, 2006 4:58 AM, Hadley Wickham said...: How did you collect the data? I think that this would make a great data set for undergrad stats - no more boring relationship between gas use and weather!
At January 11, 2006 10:53 AM, Anonymous said...: Have you seen this?

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t34949.html

Yeesh.
At January 11, 2006 5:57 PM, Jeremy said...: This is interesting as far as it goes, but the title is deceiving. You don't really talk much about 'student life,' but rather about 'student preferences' as expressed on Facebook.

A couple things I'd love to see gleaned from this data set are:

- Content analysis on the 'wall' messages for liberal vs. conservative students
- the extent to which there is overlap in networks of liberal vs. conservative students and/or those with specific entertainment/sexual/etc. preferences. Are we seeing Balkanization of the freshman class via facebook or expanding horizons?

Plus, there's lots of anecdotal evidence (if only from reading facebook profiles) that the real value of the site isn't in expressing political/entertainment preferences, but in increasing the probabibility of hooking up with that cute girl/boy who sits in front of you in class. This is especially true for LGBT students, in that facebook reveals sexual orientation (which is otherwise highly ambiguous). It'd be _very_ interesting to look at this dimension of what's going on.

Anyhow, interesting start. Keep circulating what you find!
At January 11, 2006 9:26 PM, Patrick said...: This is a very interesting report and you should be proud of the initiative and vision in your project. Studying the dynamics of cybersocial organisms has a bright and interesting future, and is to become perhaps an essential element of the long-term future of computing *and* society.

I wonder aloud about a couple of things. First, as to the moving averages: clearly, given any sort of margin of error, political orientation is *not* moving. In fact it appears quite level and the fluctuations seem miniscule in comparison; further, any movement might be just as easily associated with external political events as it might be associated with the "changing freshman" theory. While it is true you are not making statistical inference by using the entire population, your entire population and your entire statistic *is* subject to a voluntary response bias, namely because your population is necessarily volunteering their information. Therefore I suspect that you cannot make inference from your data to the general student population and "walk away with a broader understanding" , at least not along the lines of the dynamics of political orientation among campus freshmen. I don't know about the other statistics. To your credit you are fairly clear about this limitation repeatedly in your text. So to Rueben I'd say yes the p statistic does *not* apply. I'd also defend you by saying you're breaking ground and just getting started on something bigger.

It might be interesting to pursue further the relationship between people adding picture metadata and their expectations/motivations for doing so. Personally I'm moving forward with the assumption that the future of metadata is automation--extraction, learning, & synthesis--but there's something here that might be good cause for actualy surveying/interviewing a sample of your population. *Metadata can be fun* But who'dathunkit?

I like this a great deal. Good work Fred!
At January 13, 2006 11:29 AM, Anonymous said...: Interesting analysis, but it seems like you need some sort of baseline. Do facebook users change any of these profile details on a regular basis? I've seen people use facebook, and while they use it regularly, most of their use is just posting messages on friends' pages, or adding/confirming new friends.

Also, the term "friend" on a social networking site doens't correlate well with the term "friend" in real life. I know facebook users that have "friends" on the site that they actively dislike in real life. Ex-boyfriends, people they graduated high school with, random people that go to their same school, all can be "friends" on facebook.

-Ted
At January 13, 2006 11:54 PM, Wesley Hallman said...: This is a very interesting analysis. As a student at The University of Alabama, I find the research results of favorite movie, music, and books according to political orientation at the University of North Carolina closely resemble those of students at UA. For example, liberal students most often name Garden State as a favorite movie, while conservative students often cite The Notebook and Anchorman as their favorites. It would be interesting to see research results similar to this from other universities.
At January 14, 2006 10:12 PM, Frankie Dintino said...: What a bizarre coincidence... on the exact same day I posted a rather similar post on the results of my analysis of Salisbury University's facebook (where I was a former student). I focused mainly on quantitative data, but I find the results of your analysis of the "favorites" section very interesting. Nice work.
At February 09, 2006 10:01 AM, jhupp said...: This is incredibly interesting. I wonder if you or anyone else has developed any normative conclusions based on these findings.

For instance, the disagreement in movies and music is pretty marked, and it certainly seems that liberal students like "intellectual" bands and "controversial" movies while conservatives like light-hearted comedies and country music. They do not enjoy each other's respective genres.

Does it say that liberals are smarter or conservatives don't want to think? Or does it say liberals take themselves too seriously and conservatives actually know how to enjoy something?

Or, because they're freshman, is it possible that liberals have been attempting to be collegiate for longer and had these more stereotypically collegiate preferences already, and as college passes, the two groups will converge (either by liberal disenchantment with differentess or conservative acquisition of collegiate taste)?

And why is the level of disagreement in books far smaller? Perhaps people don't read enough when they are younger, and seniors would have a much starker difference in book preferences.

And then again, the difference that does exist is quite stark. The Bible in one list and Siddartha and 1984 in the other, both of which seem extremely in keeping with stereotypes.

All in all, very interesting. Thanks for doing this. I've wandered about doing something like this at Northwestern, but I just haven't had a) the time or b) a good idea of how to go about it.
At February 14, 2006 12:11 AM, Anonymous said...: fascinating.
At April 18, 2006 1:04 AM, Anonymous said...: As an amateur Facebook watcher myself at a VERY Liberal liberal arts college I think one thing that's worth considering here is the issue of self-perception and/or self-reporting.

At my college, people who identified as "Extremely Liberal" were typically being honest. People who identified as "Liberal" typically had a myopic view of what a more moderate form of liberalism entails. Those who identified as Moderate were just fooling themselves.

On the other hand I suspect that many people who would typically be considered Conservative by Liberals and Extremely Liberal people identify themselves as Moderate. People who identify as Extremely Conservative are rightfully the smallest group here and, to be honest, I suspect that number is inflated given more objective standards of what "Extremely Conservative" behavior is.
At April 20, 2006 6:27 PM, Media Mogul said...: Did you see Kent State has banned its student-athletes from the site?

http://globalmediainsight.blogspot.com/2006/04/kent-state-bans-athletes-from-facebook.html
At September 22, 2006 5:11 PM, ben said...: hello

May someone invite me to facebook??

Ganor80@yahoo.com

Ben(high school)
At September 23, 2006 8:47 PM, Anonymous said...: also need a invitation please, bty iam from chian, thanks.

ureaching@gmail.com
At June 08, 2007 3:46 AM, mimianlee said...: Very informative analysis. Students from military school are also doing great with their performance.
Thanks for sharing this.
At December 30, 2007 5:05 PM, UCLA Instructor said...: Outstanding analysis. What it all boils down to, though, is that we all need human connections, however we form them, to make college (or high school, or any time of our lives) more meaningful and enjoyable, a discussion I've seen recently at a grass-roots level at places like http://www.iscollegefun.com/. You've got to put in an effort, even if it's through computer keystrokes rather than face-to-face meetings, to make the good times happen.
At June 18, 2008 10:44 AM, Martha said...: Good Post,
At July 09, 2008 8:51 PM, ChristopherA said...: Any chance I could get some statistics or chart on the following "The average number of friends a freshman on the Facebook had on day one was 46, and at the end of the semester, he or she had 111 friends. This might give us a picture of how many friends a freshman might make the first semester of college: 65."

I'm writing a followup article on my popular blog posts on the Dunbar Number at www.LifeWithAlacrity.com
At July 09, 2008 11:05 PM, fred said...: Christopher,

Yes, I've got a chart that illustrates the progression. I use it in my talks but I can't find it posted to the web. If you email me I'll be happy to send it to you.
At August 02, 2008 8:45 PM, makatbi said...: also I At my college, people who identified as "Extremely Liberal" were typically being honest.
Thanks