Many social media studies and discussions use time spent on platforms as proof of various theories and conclusions, but it turns out that people are actually very bad at saying how long it takes, according to Facebook research.
For example, if you were conducting a study that looked at how social media use is potentially influenced or was affected by mood, you would likely rely on self-reported statistics for both measures.
There is no objective way to measure mood, of course, so you have to rely on what the participant says. And one would think those people would have a pretty decent understanding of how much time they spent scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Not so much!
Everyone understands that these self-reported numbers will have an error, and some studies have shown it, but this Facebook meta-study, comparing self-reporting to actual server logs, shows that the connection is likely not reliable enough to can be used for serious scientific purposes. work.
Answers to some questions, compared to internal data, showed that people overestimated their time on the site by averaging hours. But they also underestimated the number of times they opened the app or site. Check out this interesting graph:
As you can see, despite what they thought, very few people actually spent more than three hours a day on the site, with the vast majority spending around one. And the opposite was true for logins - relatively few people thought they would open the app ten times a day or more, yet it was extremely common. Younger people in particular were prone to error, which, as these studies tend to have more of that demographic, only underscores the problem.
None of this is to say that Facebook isn't a site that people spend a lot - perhaps too much - time on, even by their own estimates. But it is important that studies of these phenomena are based on reliable data, and it seems that the self-reported data is not that.
As Facebook puts it: "We suggest researchers not to use these values directly, but rather to interpret the time people spend as a noisy estimate of where they fall on a distribution compared to other respondents."
In other words, instead of saying "teens who spend 2 hours or more on Facebook were more likely to ..." you might say, "users in the top 10% of self-reported Facebook use were more likely to. .." or something like that. If exact times are needed online, a tracking app or collaboration with Facebook is probably a good idea.
You can read the full document describing the Facebook search here.
