[Student's Name]

[Instructor's Name]

[Course Title]

4 December 2012

Life without Facebook for a Week

Introduction

Nowadays, social networking sites emerged as a part of life for most of the people, particularly young individuals. The inevitable rise of facebook might be an undoubted reality; however, it can be easily evident and track from trends of social media rather than predict them. People used to spend a number of hours using social networking sites like facebook, which has a significant influence on the ecosystem and family systems.

The researcher in order to examine the impact of not using facebook, adopted an experimental approach by not using facebook for a week, either on the web or on the phone. The study only assesses the effect of not using facebook on the family system and ecosystem of an individual, and other factors remain constant. The factors that are taken into consideration include change frequency of communication with a family member; change in eating behaviors; spend time in different types of environments; and dress in a different manner; change the openness/closeness of a family boundary; and interact with a family member you do not usually interact with.

Methods

The data is collected by examining the pre and post states the researcher has experienced before and after not using facebook. Pre and post assessment is used to assess the impact facebook has on the ecosystem and family system of an individual. For example, the number of minutes (time), researcher spends in doing other thing rather than using Facebook, as well as the data regarding the experience of researcher without facebook (Baym, 32-94).

In order to collect the data quantitative methodology of data collection is used. Quantitative research is the systematic investigation of social phenomena (facebook impact) by means of computational, mathematical and statistical techniques. The reason to use quantitative methodology for data collection is the development and use of the proposition to pertain the phenomenon. In addition, the measurement process is vital to quantitative study as it offers the elementary link between mathematical expression and empirical observation of quantitative associations. Data collection is in numeric form like percentages, frequencies, statistics and others.

To collect pre and post data, questionnaire is used. Each factor of the family and ecological system are determined by a question. Questionnaire includes open-end questions so that respondents have the opportunity to respond apparently without any restriction. For example, where an individual spend most of the time, when using facebook or not; whether a person spend more time in eating; family bond become strong; has an influence on dressing pattern; family interaction increased or not; spend more time in other activities like meeting friends and others (Sparks, 25-110).

The respondents filled the questionnaire twice, once when using facebook and other after suspended facebook for a week to examine how much time respondents spend on facebook and what affect it has on the family system and ecosystem.

Results

The results apparently demonstrated the fact that facebook brought drastic change in the way people interact with family members. The data demonstrated ...