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Facebook Studied For Academic Research

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By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM, The New York Times

Published: December 17, 2007

Each day, about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate "friends," compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.

To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, is monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name for privacy reasons.

"One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste," said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. "Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?"

In other words, Facebook - where users rate one another as "hot or not," play games like "Pirates vs. Ninjas" and throw virtual sheep at one another - is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.

"We're on the cusp of a new way of doing social science," said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. "Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have."

Facebook's network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research. Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.

But it is Facebook's role as a petri dish for the social sciences that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.

Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.

Much of the research is continuing and has not been published, so findings are preliminary. In a few studies, Facebook users do not know they are being examined. A spokeswoman for Facebook says the site has no policy prohibiting scholars from studying profiles of users who have not activated certain privacy settings.

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