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Student Facebook Use Predicted by Race, Ethnicity, Education |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: New research from Northwestern University finds that college students' choice of social networking sites -- including Facebook, MySpace and Xanga -- is related to their race, ethnicity and parents' education. The findings challenge discourse about the democratic nature of online interaction and fly in the face of conventional wisdom suggesting that all college students communicate via Facebook, the popular social networking site (SNS) launched in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate. "That race, ethnicity and the education level of one's parents can predict which social network sites a student selects suggests there's less intermingling of users from varying backgrounds on these sites than previously believed," says Eszter Hargittai, author of "Whose Space" Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites." That study, now in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, finds that Facebook is the social networking site of choice for white students, that Hispanic students prefer MySpace and that Asian and Asian-American students are least likely to use MySpace. While prodigious users of Facebook, Asian and Asian-American students were found to use the less popular social network sites Xanga and Friendster more than students from other ethnic groups. "There seems to be a positive relationship between years of parental schooling and Facebook and Xanga use, and a negative one between years of parental education and MySpace use," says Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies and sociology at Northwestern University and faculty associate at the Institute for Policy Research. What's more, it suggests that social networking sites actually may contribute to a two-tier social system if, as the study suggests, people who already are interacting less with others on campus are also doing less interacting online.
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