Instagram Use & Gender: Blog Post
As of 2018, 22.95 million Canadian citizens have at least one social media account that they access at least once a day (Statista 2018). Therefore this statistical report aims to answer the following question: Does gender influence weekly social media use, particularly on Instagram? Instagram, which is the dependant variable, is an online social media site where its users can share pictures and live stories with other users who follow their account. They receive “likes” from their followers and can “like” other people’s pictures as well. The other variable is gender, which is the independent variable. For the purpose of this report gender will be either male or female. Since social media has become a part of daily life for Canadian citizens, it is important to continue to study and gather current data in order to properly understand this growing phenomenon within society. Data for this report was taken from the Reuters 2017 Digital News Report data set and report.
The null hypothesis for this research report is that gender does not influence weekly Instagram use; and the alternative hypothesis for this research report is that gender does influence people’s weekly use of instagram. To determine which hypothesis is correct we used statistics from the Reuters Digital News Report Questionnaire 2017 in a Chi-Square test to gather data between the gender (IV) and weekly Instagram use (DV). The Chi-Square test will show how likely it is for there to be a difference between the null and alternative hypothesis and how likely an observed distribution is due to chance.
After examining the data produced by the chi-square test in SPSS we can see our assumption was not violated. All expected counts are higher than 5, this means we did not need to collapse/merge categories for this analysis.
It is important to include the Instagram crosstabulation chart because it shows the results of the survey which is the basis for this report. We created this crosstabulation chart in SPSS, using the Reuters 2017 Digital News Report data set. This survey shows that it had 2531 participants, of which 1245 were males and 1286 were females. The number of males who use Instagram weekly is 212 while 1033 said they do not. As for the females, 302 say they do use Instagram on a weekly basis, whereas 984 do not. Considering the number of females that participated in the survey is slightly higher than males it seems as though both genders have similar patterns in Instagram use.
There are a few implications to consider while examining the results of the survey. First, it doesn’t take into account the ages of the participants. 64% of people aged 18–29 actively use Instagram whereas only 40% of people aged 30–49 use Instagram and this number continues to fall as people age (Statista 2018) . Therefore, we can conclude that age does influence how often a person uses Instagram on a weekly basis and should be taken into account when reviewing this data.
The data from this survey has the potential to positively impact society in a few ways. First it is able to provide better support to advertisers who use the app as a medium for visibility by showing who their target audience should be based on who uses Instagram more on a weekly basis. By having the Chi-Square test show if the null hypothesis is true or not, developers are able to accurately tailor their software to appeal more to its users and make it more exciting and new depending on how often people use the app on a weekly basis.
This report was created for the University of Ottawa, as part of a CMN3102: Quantitative Research Methods course. This report is part of our class final project, which aims to explore links between Canadians and their use of social media. As mentioned above, the outcomes from this class project, not just our own contributions but the contributions of other classmates, has the potential to inform advertising and communication campaigns in how to use social media effectively to reach target audiences throughout Canada. To date, little research has been done on social media use by Canadians, as most studies focus on the United States. While the results would be somewhat generalizable to Canada, it is invaluable to have Canadian-specific data.
References
Reuters Institute (2017). 2017 Digital News Report. Retrieved from: Reuters Digital News Report from 2017.
Statista (2018). Percentage of U.S. adults who use Instagram as of January 2018, by age group. Retrieved from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/246199/share-of-us-internet-users-who-use-instagram-by-age-group/
Statista (2018). Number of social network users in Canada from 2015 to 2022 (in millions). Retrieved from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/260710/number-of-social-network-users-in-canada/