Questions we Can Help you to Answer

Paper Instructions:

For this paper, I would like you to collect data about and reflect upon your own social media use, what science tells us about its implications on your psychological or social self, and what changes you should consider implementing. You can determine which form(s) of data collection you will use. The following are some examples (which are by no means exhaustive):

- Write in a diary nightly or ask a friend to interview you about your social media use.
- Set your timer to go off throughout the day and make notes about what you were doing and how you felt at that moment.
- Use a time tracking application (e.g., Web Timer, RescueTime) to generate data about your website and app use patterns.
- Collect all your social media posts and assess them systematically (e.g., using language analysis software such as LIWC: http://www.liwc.net/tryonline.php

No matter what form(s) of data collection you use, you need to collect data across several days in some systematic way and keep records. You will also need to describe your method in your paper.

Then, review your dataset and determine one or two activities or processes you engage in that you think might be hurtful or helpful (e.g., checking social media sites while studying, “liking” instead of “commenting” on friends’ posts, reading the title and snippet of news articles stead of the full articles, having location service on all the time, to name a few). Find and read research about those particular activities or mental states and their relationship to psychological or social processes. To do a good job, I would expect a bibliography of at least 5 sources, at least 3 of which are academic research papers (e.g., journal article, conference proceeding article, or academic book). 

A good starting point for your research is well-researched Wikipedia entries or popular press articles, like this piece 
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/14/active-vs-passive-social-media/?ncid=mobilerecirc_featured
and this blog 
post https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/hard-questions-is-spending-time-on-social-media-bad-for-us/

But note that these pieces are not considered academic papers themselves. Instead, they provide pointers to academic papers for further research. I also recommend Google Scholar as a search engine for research papers. 

For each of your activities/processes, explain what the research suggests might be an outcome of (or correlated with) your behaviors. Keep in mind the research could suggest that a particular activity or orientation is helpful or hurtful. If it’s helpful, you will want to do more of it. If it’s hurtful, you will want to do less of it. I am asking you to go beyond surface-level popular press Utopian or Dystopian pronouncements and to engage with the empirical literature in a nuanced way.

Finally, develop a plan that would maximize your positive and minimize your negative outcomes. I am not asking you to commit to actually doing any of these things, but you need to show me that you understand the research, so be specific as possible. For instance, “I will make an effort to write more comments on Facebook, especially for my strong ties” is better than “I will use Facebook less.” You need to provide support for the changes you are proposing.