Aryn Karpinski, one of the Ohio State education department researchers, was quoted in the Times of London as saying, “Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying. Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon.”


Ms. Karpinski will be presenting her findings this week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Researchers questioned 219 US undergraduates and graduates about their study practices and general internet use, as well as their specific use of Facebook.

They found that 65% of Facebook users accessed their account daily, usually checking it several times to see if they had received new messages. The amount of time spent on Facebook at each log-in varied from just a few minutes to more than an hour.

The Ohio report shows that students who used Facebook had a “significantly” lower grade point average – the marking system used in US universities – than those who did not use the site.

“It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B,” said Karpinski.

21-year-old Daisy Jones, an undergraduate in her final year at Loughborough University said, “I was in the library trying to write a 2,000-word essay when I realised my Facebook habit had got out of hand. I couldn’t resist going online. You do that, then someone’s photo catches your eye. Before you know it, a couple of minutes has turned into a couple of hours and you haven’t written a thing”.

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All of the profile owners were 18 years old and living in the United States.

Some 54 per cent of the profiles contained references to risky behaviors. One-quarter of the profiles examined mentioned sexual behaviors while 44 per cent referred to substance abuse. Almost one in three spoke about alcohol use while 14 per cent referred to violence.

The study, published in the current issue of Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, found that teenagers, whose profiles indicated religious involvement or had references to active participation in a sport or hobby, were less likely to contain any kind of risky information.

“Once we started getting the findings, we wondered, why are they doing this?” Moreno said. “Do they not get it? And, if they don’t understand that this is public, can we send them a cautionary message to let them know just how public their information really is?”

More than 90 percent of teens in the United States have access to the Internet, according to background information from the studies. About half of all teens who use the Internet also use social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook and about one-quarter of those belong to teens under 18.

Kimberly Mitchell, the author of an accompanying editorial in the same issue of the journal and a research professor at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, “It’s important for parents to understand how important these social networking sites are to kids,” she said. “They’re here to stay, and they’re not all evil. There can be some really positive aspects to these sites. But adolescents aren’t necessarily thinking 10 years ahead, when employers or college administrators may look at these sites. Teens live in the here and now, so parents need to talk to kids about the longer-term impacts and help them think through some of the repercussions.”

Moreno suggested that parents ask teens to show them their MySpace or Facebook pages. “Teens will definitely balk, but they balk at lots of things, like curfews,” she said. “Some parents feel it’s a violation of privacy, like reading a diary, but it’s out there, it’s public.”

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