Enough to attract dozens of research groups across the country, apparently.
One research group on the East Coast is studying how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships.
Another team at Penn State studied how individuals reacted to another person's friends count on Facebook. They found that people with many friends were perceived as popular, attractive and self confident. However, people with TOO many friends (800+) are seen as insecure.
But how accurate is the sampling on Facebook? Researchers are delving into that topic too. According to Eszter Hargittai, Facebook is popular among white, Asian, and Asian-American people, while MySpace is more popular for Hispanic students.
One Harvard team studies Facebook profiles of many students without their permission, which has sparked a debate about the ethical issues surrounding Facebook research. The laws in place currently allow the study of human subjects in a public setting, but whether Facebook is public domain or not is debateable.
I don't like the fact that potential job recruiters or anyone else can see my profile. I feel like because of this, many people are putting their Facebooks on "friends only," which doesn't open them to new people as much.
My Facebook is set to the Chicago network, but unless the person has a different connection to me, they can't see my profile unless they friend me. This is one of the safeguards in the system, but judging by this article, many people don't seem to use the security options available.
Is studying people's profiles without their permission ethical? Is Facebook really a viable research tool in studying social relationships?
The rest of the article can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/style/17facebook.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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To respond to your question about whether or not Facebook is really a viable research tool in studying social relationships, I think that in some cases it can be. For my final project for class on dating at Macalester I interviewed a group of boys of campus who are known for likeing to talk about dating, and they themselves use facebook in analyzing both romantic interests and those of their friends. They talked about using everything from whether a person not in a realtionship listed themselves as 'single' (seen as a "desperate" move by some of the boys) to whether a romantic interest sent them a wall-post or a message (a message being private and thus indicating more serious interest).
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