Social science inquiry advance and evolve over time

Reflect on the concepts of a growing body of research as captured in the article A Review of Facebook Research in the Social Sciences. Then, in a short answer response, address the following questions:

How does social science inquiry advance and evolve over time?
Why is it important that our understanding of social science concepts continue to develop and expand?
Then, consider the question you posed in the observation journal: How do cognitive biases influence our behaviors to gender stereotypes? How could others build upon this question through additional research or follow-up questions?A Review of Facebook Research in the Social Sciences Perspectives on Psychological Science 7(3) 203­–220 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1745691612442904 http://pps.sagepub.com Robert E. Wilson1, Samuel D. Gosling2 , and Lindsay T. Graham2 1 Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and 2Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin Abstract With over 800 million active users, Facebook is changing the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another and share information. A rapidly growing body of research has accompanied the meteoric rise of Facebook as social scientists assess the impact of Facebook on social life. In addition, researchers have recognized the utility of Facebook as a novel tool to observe behavior in a naturalistic setting, test hypotheses, and recruit participants. However, research on Facebook emanates from a wide variety of disciplines, with results being published in a broad range of journals and conference proceedings, making it difficult to keep track of various findings. And because Facebook is a relatively recent phenomenon, uncertainty still exists about the most effective ways to do Facebook research. To address these issues, the authors conducted a comprehensive literature search, identifying 412 relevant articles, which were sorted into 5 categories: descriptive analysis of users, motivations for using Facebook, identity presentation, the role of Facebook in social interactions, and privacy and information disclosure. The literature review serves as the foundation from which to assess current findings and offer recommendations to the field for future research on Facebook and online social networks more broadly. Keywords Facebook, online social network, social networking sites, social network analysis, privacy, motivation, identity presentation The sheer online ubiquity of Facebook is astounding. As of February 2012, Facebook had over 845 million users (more than the population of Europe) who spent more than 9.7 billion minutes per day on the site (Facebook, 2012; Rusli, 2012; for a description of Facebook, see Appendix A). Users share four billion pieces of content per day, including uploads of 250 million photos, and Facebook is now integrated with over seven million websites and applications (Facebook, 2012; Tsotsis, 2011). In March 2010, Facebook passed Google to become the most visited website in the United States, accounting for 7.07% of all U.S. web traffic (Dougherty, 2010). And Facebook’s dominance extends well beyond the United States, with over 80% of current users residing outside of the country (Facebook, 2012). Despite having only about 3,000 employees worldwide, Facebook is valued at around $100 billion U.S. dollars (Facebook, 2012; Gertner, 2011; Siegler, 2011, Swartz, 2012). In short, since its creation in February 2004, Facebook has become a spectacular success by creating a massive new domain in which millions of social interactions are played out every day. This burgeoning new sphere of social behavior is inherently fascinating, but it also provides social scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to observe behavior in a naturalistic setting, test hypotheses in a novel domain, and recruit participants efficiently from many countries and demographic groups. As researchers scramble to keep up with the rapid evolution of Facebook in terms of size, features, and policies, we assess the degree to which social scientists have been successful in illuminating the psychological and sociological processes associated with this online social network (OSN). Our original goal was to review all articles ever written about Facebook and produce a neat summary of what the findings to date have taught us. However, we soon discovered that despite there being a sizeable body of research on Facebook, the questions, methods, and perspectives were so diverse and fragmented that it would be impossible to write a coherent summary of the literature. But we also realized that without summarizing the current trends in the literature—fragmented though they are—the situation was unlikely to improve. So we reviewed the literature and used it as the launching point for a broader examination of best-practice methods as well as a consideration of promising directions for future research. The current article is the result. As this article will show, there has been major progress toward analyzing behavior on Facebook and effectively Corresponding Author: Robert E. Wilson, Washington University in St. Louis, Psychology Building, Campus Box 1125, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130 E-mail: robertwilson@go.wustl.edu 204 utilizing Facebook as a research tool. However, there is much variability in the quality of research. Our comparative analyses identified a number of obstacles impeding research on Facebook and served as the foundation for specifying some robust research methods and best-practice recommendations in this and related domains.