Northwestern study contradicts Ohio State study: Facebook does not correlate to lower grades

A Northwestern University study found that there is no connection between poor academic performance and Facebook use.

The study contradicts an Ohio State study published in April that found Facebook users have lower grade point averages.

The OSU study, co-authored by education doctoral student Aryn Karpinski, suggested that college students who use Facebook spend less time studying, resulting in lower grades.

But Northwestern University researchers say Karpinski’s study, “A Description of Facebook Use and Academic Performance Among Undergraduate and Graduate Students,” was inaccurate.

“We found no evidence of Facebook use correlating with lower academic achievement,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate communications professor at Northwestern and co-author of the study, in an e-mail. “If anything, Facebook use is more common among students with higher grades.”

The study at Northwestern, titled “Facebook and Academic Performance: Reconciling a Media Sensation with Date,” was published May 4 and received considerable media coverage.

Samples included 1,060 Illinois University at Chicago undergraduates and 1,250 random telephone interviews of 14- to 23-year-olds, according to the study.

“I suspect that basic Facebook use – what these studies measure – simply doesn’t have generalizable consequences for grades,” said Hargittai, who is also a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Hargittai said it is important to note the motivation behind the Facebook user.

“The Internet and social networking sites in particular can be used in any number of ways, some of which may be beneficial to the user and others less so,” Hargittai said. “If somebody’s spending an [unusual] amount of time on Facebook at the expense of studying, his or her performance may stuffer.”

But Karpinski acknowledged her study’s limitations.

“This study was very basic,” she said.

For the OSU study, Karpinski recruited students from classes to complete a questionnaire on their Facebook use and their grade point averages. Researchers used 219 OSU students for the study’s sample.

The study was submitted to the American Educational Research Association conference in San Diego to create dialogue about social media and to network with researchers, she said.

Despite the limitations of the study, OSU’s media communication team contacted Karpinski for an interview.

OSU’s media communications team then drafted press releases and posted an article on osu.edu.

Karpinski said she had no idea that media coverage would go beyond local newspapers.

But in the days after the OSU study was published, a Google News search for “Facebook” and “grades” resulted in more than 500 references to Karpinski’s report.

The publicity created a media storm and was featured on such outlets as The Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

“If my research was intended to be published, which it was not, a more rigorous experimental design with more controls would have been implemented,” Karpinski said.

Earle Holland, assistant vice president of research communications, said he knew the limitations and dangers of publicizing an exploratory study.

“But this was a pilot study, it wasn’t intended to show any causality,” Holland said in a phone interview. “What we didn’t figure was how badly most of the conventional news media would muck up the story in the process.”

The same week the news release about Karpinski study was posted on osu.edu, The Sunday Times of London ran an article about the study.

“Within days [of that article], hundreds of news stories were all over the Web,” Holland said.

The article in The Sunday Times did not translate scientific research and did not present the story accurately, Holland said.

“The crux of the problem centered on reporters’ apparent ignorance of the terms ‘correlation’ and ‘causation,’ two relatively common technical research terms that are as different as night and day,” Holland said.

The Sunday Times did perform an interview with Karpinski, and she did stress that there was no causality in her study, Holland said.

“In the end, the frenzy to be first with the news helped the media misinform the public and betrayed the essence of the research in question,” Holland said.

Marc Feher can be reached at [email protected].