Researcher studies Facebook use by college freshmen at UNC
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Facebook is an online social networking directory that has become the rage on college campuses since it debuted in 2004. College students have created around six million accounts. Students make personal profiles pages, which typically contain photos. They can exchange messages, and join groups of friends. Profiles often contain a lot of personal information, such as relationship status and sexual preference.
Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, has just completed a study of Facebook use by freshman from the class of 2009.
A strong piece, and useful for college composition courses that require a research paper. Several of my students (all women) last semester were on facebook at the start of every class period. I tried to get them to ask themselves what they were doing, why it was so much more engaging than the course—to write about it, in short. Now, there's research on facebook, by a university graduate student/professor, on undergraduate use of facebook. Further, your interview and Stutzman's responses suggest how the researcher thinks about his data, and how others might be ready to think about his data, and how he takes that into account. Etc. A good case for first-year composition students.
