SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

Following my one-to-one with Jennifer (here) and the decision to carry out social experiments for further research into social media obsession & dependency, a small experiment was conducted amongst a few of my personal Facebook friends. I asked for individuals who would be willing to note down how many times they checked their social media accounts within a 24 hour time period - whether this be on their phones, laptops, tablets, etc. Nine friends agreed to take part and proceeded to keep track of their social media visits.

Below are the results of the nine anonymous people of various ages, ranging from 19 - 70+, that took part (oldest to youngest):

Participant 1 - 07 times

Participant 2 - 26 times

Participant 3 - 81 times

Participant 4 - 35 times

Participant 5 - 42 times

Participant 6 - 50 times

Participant 7 - 16 times

Participant 8 - 45 times

Participant 9 - 66 times

Taking into account that some of the results may not be 100% accurate, these findings are being used as a rough calculation. On average, the number of social media visits were more frequent within younger participants. If the person in question was awake from 8am-11pm, it would transpire that the most active individual checked for updates around 9 times an hour with the least checking only once every few hours. After examination, the results show that the average person checks their social media around 4 times an hour within a normal day. 

This experiment was conducted on a Tuesday/Wednesday, which for most people is a normal working day. Personally I think these results are extremely high as on a weekday most people would be at work, college, uni, etc. and shouldn't really be updating social media. I think that the results would show an even higher quantity of social media activity if collected on a weekend, as people have extra time to themselves and are free to socialise within this time. Another experiment to clarify this would help me gain a complete understanding of how dependant the participants are to their social media throughout the week and I would then be able to make an improved judgement on the results.