{"id":25483,"date":"2018-07-31T12:34:01","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T16:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/?p=25483"},"modified":"2022-03-16T10:38:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T14:38:00","slug":"demographics-of-facebook-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/demographics-of-facebook-users\/","title":{"rendered":"Study Reveals Demographics of Facebook Users"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you on Facebook? In a recent study, Eric P.S. Baumer<\/a>, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University, set out to explore the demographic and socioeconomic factors that impact Facebook use and non-use<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are approximately 214 million<\/a> active Facebook users in the U.S. For perspective, around 68 percent<\/a> of the country\u2019s adult population has an account with the social media site.<\/p>\n

For demographers, Facebook\u2019s immense usership raises a few questions: What types of people use Facebook? What kinds of people do not? What different kinds of Facebook users are there? And how much can we draw conclusions about general social phenomena from Facebook user data?<\/p>\n

While Baumer is not the first to research the demographics of Facebook usership, his new study takes a uniquely nuanced approach to these phenomena. This means looking at Facebook usership in non-binary terms.<\/p>\n

A binary approach would categorize people simply as users or non-users, which, Baumer suggested, is too reductive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink about the people you know,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you ask each of them, \u2018Do you use Facebook?\u2019 there will probably be some who respond, \u2018Well, I have an account, but I don\u2019t really use it for anything.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That is, Facebook use varies from person to person. While some visit the site every day, some may only visit the site on occasion. Others may have deactivated their page or are considering deactivation.<\/p>\n

Baumer combed through data collected by Cornell University\u2019s Survey Research Institute in 2015 for the Cornell National Social Survey, which includes responses from 1,000 U.S. households gleaned from a phone survey of adults 18 years or older. Importantly, the data is self-reported, which restricted the scope of the study somewhat.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important to keep in mind the limitations that come with self-report survey data,\u201d said Baumer.<\/p>\n

\u201cFurthermore, we only asked about the kinds of non-use for which Facebook provides technical mechanisms: deactivation and deletion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are plenty of other interesting approaches I\u2019ve seen in other studies I\u2019ve conducted, such as asking a friend to change your password, installing software that blocks access to specific websites, or simply never logging in despite having an account, that wouldn\u2019t show up here.\u201d<\/p>\n

With these parameters, Baumer settled on four distinct categories of Facebook use.<\/p>\n

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