The SIQSS study (discussed below) summary results have been released and I’ve had some time to look them over. Before I begin, I should note that what is provided on the website isn’t actually a research paper at all, but the researchers’ summary of their data. As such, it doesn’t really answer many questions other researchers may have, and it doesn’t provide the usual framework colleages look for in order to conduct further analyses. I should also note that the study has not been peer-reviewed, which means there is no guarantee that any of the statistics or assumptions the researchers made were appropriate to their datasets or the hypotheses they were testing. In other words, the ‘study,’ such as it is, leaves a lot to be desired in its current form.

One of the first decisions the researchers made was to include only respondants that had used the Internet on the previous day, and then arbitrarily referred to this group as “Internet users.” We know from broadly-accepted survey data that 120 million Americans currently use the Internet, or approximately 55-60% of adult Americans. Yet the researchers in this study only sampled 31% of their respondant base (that’s a 44 to 51% discrepancy). The discrepancy may be accounted for by the age range of their respondants (18-64), but it’s unclear from the data they presented or the rationale for classifying their population by this method. This discrepancy alone could account for the researchers’ findings.

In comparison, other studies in this field consider a person to be an “Internet user” simply if they’ve used the Internet in the past week or month (not just the past day). By limiting their definition of “Internet user” by this criteria, they may be self-selecting a sub-group of highly-active Internet users (as opposed to normalized, “generic” Internet users). Again, without the usual rationale that accompanies such decisions in published research, one cannot tell.

The researchers acknowledge that according to their data, 57% of the time spent on the Internet is in communicating with others. They then declare that time spent socializing “face-to-face” is decreased amongst their Internet users. The obvious hypothesis to pursue — that perhaps users are spending more time online socializing — is not really examined (although a sentence on page 13 alludes to this possibility).

There’s a lot of other interesting conclusions the researchers draw from their data, but I’ll leave it at that for now. It’s safe to say that the researchers still haven’t shown that Internet use is causing any additional harm to American society (e.g., decreased socialization) and heck, anything that decreases television watching can’t be that bad, right?

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 4 Jan 2005
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