EDU 508 Finding data

Finding data

In his research paper on the impact of social networking sites on college students’ consumption patterns, Whitney Sue Thoene uses inferential kind or type of data analysis. This is where a relatively small sample of data is used to say something about a bigger population. A sample of 275 college students in a Midwestern town took part in an electronic survey. Out of these 82 were male, 158 female and 35 did not provide a response. The study looked at relationship between various variables such as the time spent of facebook by female students in comparison to their male counterparts, the amount of time spent on social and its effect on buying patterns and word of mouth recommendations on social media about what to buy and how it impacts buying pattern in reality.

The study found that students who use social media often especially twitter are likely to take advantage of sales offers (444 correlation efficiency). That is to say the more time one use twitter the higher the chances of their buying patterns being affected. The other variable looked at is the usage frequency of social media and the frequency of buying at companies friended on facebook or followed on twitter. A Pearson correlation conducted for these two variables found a .027 coefficient for facebook and .465 correlation coefficient for twitter. The interpretation that can be picked and learned from the paper is that social media greatly impacts buying patterns of college students and frequent twitter users are the most affected compared to facebook users

Reference

Thoene, W. (2012). The Impact of Social Networking Sites on College Students’ Consumption Patterns. Retrieved May 28, 2015, http://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1243&context=etd