PS300: Research Methods 1
Unit 6 Team Assignment
Please list the names of all the team members below:
What was your team’s assigned topic?
The Impact of Social Media Usage on Academic Performance
What was the research question your team created based on the assigned topic?
How does the amount of time spent on social media affect students' academic performance?
What was the hypothesis your team created based on the assigned topic?
Students who spend more time on social media will have lower academic performance
compared to those who spend less time.
Please provide the URL for your team’s survey.
[Link]
1FAIpQLScgkQCS7HrXgcW4VAcLHlI5KsPMtBmG1V_n168bw_RiKrKRkA/viewform?usp=dialog
Please list the questions created for your survey.
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PS300: Research Methods 1
Section 1: Demographics
1. What is your age?
2. What is your academic level?
3. What is your current GPA?
Section 2: Social Media Usage
1. How many hours per day do you spend on social media?
2. Which social media platforms do you use most frequently? (Select all that apply)
3. How often do you use social media while studying or in class?
4. Do you feel that social media usage affects your ability to focus on studying or
completing assignments?
Section 3: Academic Habits and Performance
1. How many hours per week do you typically spend studying?
2. How would you rate your time-management skills?
3. Do you often procrastinate assignments or study sessions?
Section 4: Perceptions and Additional Factors
1. How important is social media to your daily routine?
2. Do you use social media for academic purposes (e.g., research, group projects)?
3. Have you ever avoided social media during study sessions to improve focus?
4. Do you believe social media usage impacts your academic performance? (Scale: 1 =
Strongly Disagree, 5 = Strongly Agree)
Section 5: Open-Ended Questions
Describe a time when social media usage affected your academic performance.
In at least 3–5 sentences, did the results from your team’s survey support your hypothesis? Why or
why not? Please note that you do not need to statistically analyze results; you can speak to this
generally based on the charts Google Form creates automatically for you, and may include any
images from the results to support your analysis.
Our survey results to some extent supported our hypothesis. A vast majority of respondents
who spent more than four hours a day on social media reported poorer academic
performance, as indicated in their reported GPAs and answers on study time focus. However, a
smaller group reported no significant impact of social media use on their academic
performance, implying that other factors like time management skills or study habits might
mediate this relationship.
What is one factor that might have affected the accuracy of results from your survey?
Self-reporting bias might be the reason for the inaccuracy of our results: participants may
have reported lower social media or greater academic performance than they actually used or
obtained respectively to portray themselves in a better light. Further, the generalizability is
limited by an uninformed sample size and the sampling technique used which is the
convenience sampling method.
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