In our questionnaire, we used dichotomous questions including “your gender: male or female”, “are you a: full-time student or full-time employee” and “do you check your Facebook account daily: yes or no”. Dichotomous questions are multiple choice questions where there are only two options to choose from. This allowed for us to differentiate between the people representing our independent variables. It also allowed a simple analysis regarding whether or not a majority of responding Facebook users check their accounts daily.
One multiple choice question was used, see the questionnaire (question 4), regarding how much time per week our responding Facebook users spend on Facebook itself. This gives us a more in-depth look at how relevant Facebook is in our respondents' weekly timeframes. A rank-order question was also used, see the questionnaire (question six), to determine the ranking of Facebook as a main mean of communication versus other methods including talking in person, phone calls, emails, etc.
The people studied were those who represented our independent variables. These people included and were limited to male and female full-time students and full-time employees. To reach our full-time student respondents, twenty questionnaires were conducted in the Parrot Centre of Loyalist College during regular class hours. To reach our full-time employed respondents, the remaining questionnaires were conducted during a weekday in the early afternoon at the Quinte Mall, a time when a majority of the mall workers happen to be full-time. Because we had four independent variables (male versus female and employee versus student), our goal was to have a total of twenty females and twenty males. Twenty of these would hopefully be full-time employees while the other twenty would be full-time students.
To get our sample, stratified random sampling was used. From our populations of full-time students and full-time employees, we randomly chose twenty of each using their gender as the stratifying variable. A general advantage of stratified random sampling is that one can improve how well the sample represents a population.
Collected Data
Amount of respondents registered with Facebook
Facebook User?
Yes
No
Male
17
3
Female
20
0
FT Student
19
1
FT Employee
18
2
Time/week spent on Facebook, whether users check it daily
Time/Week on Facebook
15-30 Min
30 Min-1 Hr
1-2 Hrs
3-4 Hrs
5+ Hrs
Checked Daily by Users?
Yes
No
Male
2
4
9
1
1
9
8
Female
3
4
5
3
5
14
6
FT Student
3
6
6
3
1
12
7
FT Employee
2
2
8
1
5
11
7
Facebook's percentage of priority in communication ranking
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
Male
0%
16%
21%
37%
21%
5%
Female
5%
16%
26%
42%
11%
0%
FT Student
0%
21%
32%
32%
10%
5%
FT Employee
5%
10%
17%
47%
21%
0%
Previously, we hypothesized that regarding males versus females, the majority of Facebook registration and use would be done by our female respondents. This hypothesis turned out to be correct. All twenty of our female respondents were registered and active on Facebook. Our questionnaire found that 85% of the females, with males standing at 82%, spend more than thirty minutes using Facebook per week.
It was also hypothesized that full-time students would be more likely to be registered and active with Facebook than full-time employees. This hypothesis also turned out to be somewhat correct. Out of our twenty responding full-time students, 95% (19/20) were registered with Facebook. With our twenty responding full-time employees, 90% (18/20) were registered with Facebook. 84% of the Facebook-using students spend more than thirty minutes per week on the website. However, more than thirty minutes are spent on Facebook by 89% of the full-time employees who are registered.
Conclusion
To elaborate on the discussion of the results' correlation with the hypothesis, out of the twenty female users, 70% of them check and spend time on Facebook on a daily basis whereas only 53% of our male respondents do so. 63% of the registered full-time students take part in Facebook activities daily compared to 61% of registered full-time employees.
Despite previous research stating a majority of youth now use the internet as one of their main means of social interaction, our own research found that a majority of our female respondents (42%) and male respondents (32%) use Facebook as their 4th most commonly used communication device. Regarding our students and employees, our full-time students prefer to use Facebook as their 3rd and 4th (tied at 32%) means of communication but our full-time employees use it as their 4th (47%) and 5th (21%) ranked means of communication. Just by looking over the completed questionnaires, we were able to see that most of our participants preferred to use more personal means of communication including talking on the phone or face-to face.
