After we gathered our data, it was time to start analyzing it.  We looked for a correlation between students’ time spent on social media and students’ time spent reading. A majority of students said they spend at least 4 hours on social media a week and less than 2 hours reading for pleasure. From this, we can infer that as students spend more time on social media, they spend less time reading for fun. While this seems like a pretty damning correlation, there are many other factors that can affect how much time is available in a student’s day to read.  An article featured on Wired in 2018 cited how factors like commute time, new distractions from technology and new formats of entertainment are all considered to be factors in why today’s society doesn’t read as much.

While we should keep these factors in mind when discussing this topic, for the sake of this research topic, we will focus on the impact that the use of social media has on reading.  We decided to look further into our data to find a stronger correlation. While we had already found that as students spent more time on social media, they spent less time reading, we wanted to see if the opposite was true. This meant we needed to analyze the students that spent little to no time on social media.  It was found that students that spend less time than other students on social media read more for fun and are rarely distracted while reading. The students that spent a lot of time on social media and little time reading said that they had a hard time remaining focused while reading and were often distracted. This evidence provides a deeper insight into the impact that social media has on students’ reading habits.  Not only are students not reading as much, but they are also having a harder time remaining focused while reading. Their focus is often redirected from their reading task to distractions such as social media. Social media is taking up more of students’ focus, which can lead to a student having difficulty getting tasks done when faced with deadlines and heavy workloads.

While our research and data collection was overall successful, we faced some issues.  A challenge we faced was what apps to include in our research. Although our research is based on social media apps,  we took into account that there are other apps that can distract people from studying and that are as easy to spend time on as social media apps. We know that YouTube and Netflix are not thought to be social media, but we included them in our questions because they can still distract students while they study.  These apps tend to take up more time because they are websites that feature video content that requires a larger time commitment from the platform used to consume the media.

There were some other factors that could have skewed the data set.  One of the questions: “On average, how many hours a day do you spend a day reading social media posts?” was worded differently than other questions were.  While other questions asked to average how much time was spent doing an activity in a week, this one instead asked in a day. If students did not notice this change in phrasing, they could have answered incorrectly, saying how much time they spent reading on social media in a week rather than in a day.  While these factors had the potential to skew our data set and conclusions, we were able to avoid a biased analysis by omitting these factors and comparing our conclusions to those made by previous research.