High School Prestige and Facebook Penetration: Are Wealthy Students More Likely to Use Facebook?

Social networking ethnologist Danah Boyd made waves in the social media community a few months ago with her observation that the division between Facebook and Myspace is largely socioeconomic:

Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace.

A few days ago, Chuck Lam of Data Strategy looked at schools in the San Francisco Bay area to see if Facebook penetration correlated at all with the independent ratings of local high schools by GreatSchools.net. His data set after the jump:

A quick Pearson’s correlation in Excel shows an r value of .87 between the GreatSchools rating and Facebook penetration for this (admittedly small) data set. For the layperson, an r value can range from .00 which means no correlation to 1 which means a perfect correlation. This means that school rating accounted for 87% of the variance in Facebook penetration.

Here’s how that looks on a scatterplot:

To test Lam’s analysis, I ran the same test on high schools in Seattle, WA. Here is a screenshot of the available schools in the Seattle Metro area as obtained through the use of Facebook’s network browsing function:

Of the 36 Seattle area schools available on Facebook, nineteen had GreatSchools ratings. Here is the data I used:

The Pearson’s correlation data from this sample showed an r value of .79. Here’s how that looks on a scatterplot:

As you can see, I’ve been able to closely replicate Lam’s results. Assuming that the GreatSchools rating of the high schools in question is a solid metric of socioeconomic status — or “hegemony” as Boyd calls it — this could indicate that Boyd is right: upper class teens are more likely to use Facebook. I’m curious to see what bloggers and geeks from other cities find out.

Analyzing data from MySpace becomes trickier because users do not have to join a network or say where they go to school in order to have a MySpace profile. You would actually have to go into the schools and poll the students as to whether they were on MySpace. If anyone has any data from a particular Metro area that shows how many students have a MySpace page, it would be interesting to run these same correlations with GreatSchools ratings.

A better metric of a school’s socioeconomic status overall is the percentage of kids who receive subsidized meals every day. Making a comparison there could also be useful.

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