Like Bees to Honey, Social Scientists Drawn to Facebook
Facebook is where you go to get the scoop on friends. Who’s still together and who’s broken up? Who went to last weekend’s tailgate party? Who do you know in London who wants to add you to their network? And who just got a job?
But did you know, that as a mecca of online social networking, Facebook’s also the place social scientists go to get the 411 on you—your likes, dislikes, values and the ways in which you choose and attract your friends.
Sociology, psychology and political science professors are now turning to social networking sites to test their field’s traditional theories about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement, reports Stephanie Rosenbloom for the New York Times (“On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data,” Dec. 17, 2007).
What Your Facebook Use Tells Researchers
Educators at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Northwestern University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Texas are among those eager to learn more about how internet technologies are changing social behaviors.
In a recent study, Harvard—the first school to use Facebook—is working with researchers at UCLA to monitor the Facebook profiles of an entire class of 1,700 juniors at an unnamed east coast college.
The purpose?
“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” research member Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard, tells the New York Times. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”
But the Facebook phenomenon goes beyond what characteristics you look for in a friend. Other studies have focused on uncovering the science behind your love life, how the connections you make affect your self-esteem and how others view your popularity.
Befriending for Science: Friend or Foe?
While professors are going gaga for the type of information they are gleaning from your Facebook usage, should they be allowed to do it?
Some users are told of the studies being conducted around their Facebook accounts, while others, like those at Harvard’s unnamed school, are unaware they are the guinea pigs of a social study.
New York Times reporter Rosenbloom writes “a spokeswoman for Facebook says the site currently has no policy prohibiting scholars from studying profiles of users who have not activated certain privacy settings.”
For now, academia may trump privacy and your desire to keep researchers from monitoring your wall posts and movie preferences or to read too much into who you send the most cyber kisses to.
But you can at least make sure to set your security settings to private sending a virtual flag, like the signs you used to hang on your bedroom door to keep your siblings out, saying “No Scientists Allowed.”