Thoughts on the coverage of Swinburne Uni’s Blogging Study

Following on my post last night regarding the ABC News Online article on blogging being good for your social life, I’ve just finished reading the research study itself and would like to add a few parting comments and thoughts.

I found the study itself to be quite interesting and have no issues with the methodology used, nor the way the data analysis was presented. My concern is the way the study is being reported in the media and by bloggers. The coverage has been far too superficial and tends to omit important aspects of the study and data set, and therefore leaves room for false assumptions and over-generalised conclusions.

Important Points:

According to the study:

“The aim of the current study was to survey new users to the social networking Web site Myspace.com, comparing those who intended to blog with those who did not intend to do so on several psychosocial variables. Myspace.com was chosen over blog-specific Web sites in order to obtain a comparative sample of non-bloggers in addition to intending bloggers. Myspace.com has a large volume of new users (23,000 daily at the time of publication), and all users have the option of blogging with ease.”

First of all, the age demographic of MySpace users is quite narrow and specific and not representative of the aggregate of users of social software and particularly the Internet. Reports have placed MySpace’s demographic roughly in the 18 to 24 year old range, which corresponds to the developmental period between adolescence and adulthood in which individuals are still solidifying a sense of self, personality, personal identity, as well as the wider question of their purpose and place in the world.

It is an incredibly awkward period highlighted by psychological and emotional change, which is much more extreme relative to other age demographics.

The fact the entire research sample came from MySpace, and has a mean age of 24.5 years (median of 23.5 years for males; 25.8 for females), needs to be emphasized because the same study performed on an older demographic would probably yield entirely different results.

Furthermore, in their association with the online community, users of MySpace have already identified themselves as individuals who are attracted to social networking tools. So despite the fact only a percentage of respondents indicated they were planning on starting a blog, they had all make the decision to join MySpace. This would suggest the presence of one or more common motivators amongst the entire sample, and may have served to skew the results.

Therefore the conclusions reached in this study cannot and should not be extrapolated across the wider pool of users of online applications in sweeping statements.

Secondly, this report was specifically studying psychosocial and behavioural characteristics and growth patterns of users of online applications. No mention was made in the report on motives for blogging, or planned blog contents; nor was a copy of the survey questions made available.

Importantly it is also unclear whether respondents were specifically asked whether they planned to use blogs as coping mechanisms, or whether the study sought to infer the answers to this question based on their overall responses.

Depending on how the survey questions were worded, it is possible that the nature of the questions would have attracted or repelled people who were contacted, thereby skewing the results.

Concluding Remarks:

All this being said, this study did not seek to make generalized statements about blogging, only to report the quantitative findings gathered from a specific data set and provide an interpretation on what these results seem to suggest. The generalizations have been injected into the discussion by the media and bloggers, and this is unwise.

As with any preliminary study on an emerging activity, far more research is necessary before wide sweeping statements like “blogging is good for your social life” can be made. The devil is in the detail and dependent on a myriad of different variables.

Reference:

• “Distress, Coping, and Blogging: Comparing New Myspace Users by Their Intention to Blog”, CyberPsychology & Behavior. February 1, 2008, 11(1): 81-85.