TEENAGERS VS SOCIAL
MEDIA
OUR INVESTIGATION
OUR HYPOTHESIS
Recently social media has been in the public eye
for various reasons. For example the “neck
nominations” which unfortunately lead to the
death of a young Carlow man. Also the “no makeup selfie” to promote cancer awareness which
caused big media interest.
¢ We are posing the question to see are teenagers
glued to the screens and if so which social media
is the main culprit?
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Popular opinion in media is that teenagers are
addicted to social media sites e.g. Facebook and
Twitter.
¢ From our personal experience we find that
Facebook is the most addicting as it is almost
impossible to find a teenager without an account
on the site these days in Ireland.
¢ However we also expect sites such as Twitter and
Snapchat to be addictive to a large portion of
Irish teenagers.
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Are we addicted?
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Do we recognise if we are addicted?
OUR APPROACH
OUR SURVEY
We planned to survey 200 boys and 200 girls (our
sample population) between the ages of 13-16
regarding there usage of social media
¢ We also decided to perform a test on a 15 year old
boy who had not signed up to any social media to
get a fresh perspective on our hypothesis
¢ Our final step was to collect our data, generate
our results and draw conclusions
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When we asked if the teenagers felt they were
addicted to social media only 43% of our subjects
agreed that they had an addiction.
¢ Further to this just 40% of our subjects were
willing to admit social media dominated their
free time.
¢ Interestingly almost 67% of the sample
population decided they could not last one week
without an internet connection, despite them
claiming they were not addicted.
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The first point we wanted to establish was
whether or not Irish teenagers are addicted to
social media. We discovered this by surveying
how many social sites our test subjects had
signed up to and how long they spend on these.
¢ The second point we wanted to establish was
which social media in particular did our subjects
find the most addicting
¢ The final objective of our survey was to discover
which features of the social media caused the
addiction
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To verify the claims of our surveyed people, we
asked them to tell us what social media they
were currently signed up to.
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From this data we concluded
We took a representative sample from our population of
surveyed students to illustrate how much time sixty four
students spend on social media daily.
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The results show us that a very low number of teenagers
spend only 0-30minutes on a social medium, while a high
number spend 120-180minuts
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We asked our sample population which was their
favourite social medium.
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Our graph shows a clear preference for Facebook.
Snapchat is the only other social medium with a
significant proportion in our graph.
Despite teenagers feeling they were not addicted to
social media we found that over 98% were signed up
to a social media (with 91% having accounts on
multiple sites)
Not only were the overwhelming majority on social
media sites but the average subject, from our sample
population, was spending 1 hours and 50 minutes on
there chosen sites daily.
This is clearly contrary to their beliefs that they are
not addicted but consistent with our hypothesis.
One small difference from our hypothesis was the
surprisingly small number of teenagers using Twitter.
We had anticipated this site to be far more addicting
than our results revealed.
We were very surprised to find many Irish teenagers
are not aware of their addiction or are not willing to
accept it.
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Each of our subjects were asked how long they use
all there chosen sites.
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The results
lts of the ssurvey make
ke it cl
clear that
Facebook is used by the most amount of teenagers
and, in general, for the longest periods of time
WHICH SITE IS THE MAIN CULPRIT?
Having discovered that teenagers are indeed
addicted to social media we wanted to uncover
the most addictive social media
¢ With this in mind we asked our sample
population to pick
their favourite site
and detail how often
they spent on each
site daily.
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From this data we concluded
Facebook was by far the most popular social
media outlet with over 66% of the sample
population choosing it as their first choice social
medium.
¢ Having said this, we found that the average
Facebook user from our survey spent 47 minutes
daily active on their account while despite having
fewer users Snapchat is more addicting shown by
the fact that users spend nearly 54 minutes daily
sending selfies!
¢ The negative trend of Facebook’s graph showed
that while this site may have more users, theses
users spend less time on average on the site than
Snapchat users spend on their accounts (as
displayed by the gentler slope of Snapchat’s
graph)
We asked our surveyed teenagers who chose Snapchat as
their favourite (total 108; 48 male and 60 female) why they
were most attracted to it.
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Our results show that most teenagers use social media for
contact with friends but we were quite surprised about the
difference between male and female students in content
and gossip answer.
WHY SNAPCHAT?
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As the last question of our survey asked people to
select which aspects of their preferred social
media they found most appealing (ie. What
makes it so addicting?)
¢ We allowed them to select from a range of options
or specify their own particular reasons
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CONCLUSION
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The following were the results of our tests:
OUR TEST
So as to gain a fresh insight into the addicting
nature of social media, we asked a 15 year old
male with no accounts on any of the sites
previously mentioned to sign up to each of them
and become active on all of the for one week.
¢ We then asked him to refrain from using any of
the sites for twenty four hours to allow new
content to become available for his next usage.
¢ After this break period we gave the subject three
hours to revisit all of his accounts whilst we
monitored exactly how he divided his time
amongst them.
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There is a obvious correlation between the results
of our survey and our test, with Snapchat again
proving to be the most addictive, followed closely
by Facebook. This is a trend that has emerged
through all of our results.
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On the whole our hypothesis was correct in that
teenagers are hugely addicted to social media and
Facebook has a large role to play in this.
However we were surprised to discover that Irish
teenagers find Snapchat to be the most addicting
social medium. Perhaps this is simply because
Snapchat is the latest craze in online interaction but
there is no denying its addictive nature. While it may
not have as many users as Facebook, our results
showed Snapchat to be more time consuming for the
individual user.
We were happy both our survey and test delivered
similar results as this added validity to their
accuracy.
Further studies on this topic could delve deeper into
the gender disparities shown in our final column
chart.
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