Which Social Media App Interferes the Most With Your Attention Span During Class?

D8: Rebecca Ferreri, Alexus Miller, Veronica Tamayo-Sarver

EDT 180D

Gary Lewallen

April 17th, 2017

 D8: Which Social Media App Interferes the Most With Your Attention Span During Class?

Introduction:

For our research project, we decided to research what social media app distracted ASU

students the most during class. Personally, we all had experiences when we got distracted by our

favorite social media apps during a class, and so we were curious to see which app was the most

popular for being a distraction. We started off by asking simple questions, such as:

What is your gender?

What grade are you in?

We asked those to get the basic statistics about who was taking our survey, and so we could see

is the popularity of the apps depended on a students grade or gender. Then, we asked specific

questions about social media apps:

What social media app is your favorite?

What social media app do you go on the most during class?
How often during a typical class do you go on social media?
What social media app do you go on the most while doing homework?
How often does using social media interfere with the completion of your homework?

The tool we used to collect our responses was Google Docs Form, and we got a total of 126

responses from ASU students.

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Discussion:

Gender

Male Female Other

1. Gender Chart: This chart compares the amount of males and females that took our survey. We

were surprised at the small amount of males.

2. Grade Chart: This chart compares the amount of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors that

took the quiz. No information here surprised us; we assumed the majority of participants would

be freshmen.

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3. Favorite Social Media App (Based on Gender): We found these results were a bit surprising for a

few reasons. First, we expected at least more than 2 people to have Tumblr as their favorite app.

Second, we were surprised that nobody had chosen Tinder/Gridnr/Bumble as their favorite app.

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4. The App Most Used During Class (Based on Gender): This graph shows what app students use

the most during class, and is organized by gender. We were somewhat surprised that more males

used Instagram as opposed to Snapchat. Again, we were surprised that no participants selected

Tumblr or Tinder/Grindr/Bumble.

5. The App Used Most While Doing Homework: Again, this chart separates the data by gender, and

shows which app students are distracted by when working on homework. We werent surprised

that Snapchat had the majority vote.

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6. How Often Do You Use Social Media During Class (Based on Gender): This chart shows how

often students use social media during class, ranging from Never to Basically all the Time.

This chart really shocked us, because the majority of students chose the answer 1 or 2 times.

We see students using social media so often, and we really expected the answer to be higher. I

think perhaps students may not have been 100% truthful when answering this.

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7. How Often Do You Use Social Media During Class (Based on Grade): Since we were so

surprised by the last chart, we wanted to see which grade the students were in who were using

social media during class. We really did not expect freshmen to be the majority of students who

had selected Never.

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8. How Often Does Social Media Interfere with Homework (Based on Gender): On a scale of

Never to Always, this chart shows how often students homework is interfered with due to

social media. These results werent shocking, and they seemed pretty evenly spread (except for

the answer sometimes).

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 D8: Which Social Media App Interferes the Most With Your Attention Span During Class?

Analysis:

After seeing the results of our survey, we cant really think of any other questions we

could have added, since we got all the answers we were looking for. The app most used during

class by females was Snapchat, and the app most used during class by males was Instagram.

When we brainstormed this question, these were the two apps that we suspected would win. If

we could do this again, and do things differently, we would want to find a group of participants

that had a similar amount of males and females, and had equal amounts of students in each

grade. Since the number of females and freshmen was so high, it was kind of hard to analyze the

data collected.