So over the last week I decided to survey the Year 7 students, between 11 and 12 years old, at my school about social media. I was actually surprised by the results and you might too.
The first question was just whether they use Social Media:
This one almost came down to a split of 50/50 which I found very interesting. It is certainly a larger percentage of students that do not use Social Media than I expected, very nice to see.
Next was a multi selection question that attempted to discover the parental involvement in the students Social Media activity. It also gave an opportunity for the students who did not use Social Media to say whether it was through their choice or if their parents had not permitted them to do so. Here are the results:
I feel like every answer here was meaningful with many of the parents having good monitoring of their child. A large number actually knew their child’s password - brilliant, at the same time the same number did not monitor their child’s activity - :( . There was a strong showing for the non-users with many students saying that they were not interested in using Social Media - great for them. I suppose looking at the non-users it could also be seen that it was a 50/50 split between not wanting to use Social Media and not having parental permission. Finally 2 students felt that they used Social Media without their parents knowledge - naughty.
The third question was to just further look into the peer pressure that students face with Social Media. I was quite clear with the students that I “peer pressure” many of my friends to use Social Media and we lol’d.
This one was very surprising, but maybe for the age group is correct, with more students believing that they have not been peer pressured into using Social Media. I would be very interested to see what this number if like as the students move into Years 8 and 9.
So to wrap it up, I found this to be an interesting set of results, some of which I did not expect. The students also engaged in some very intelligent conversation about Social Media and I was able to see that these kids do know what’s going on and how to behave appropriately while using Social Media. Let me know what you think by adding a comment.