Analyzing Facebook usage by high school demographic

Danah Boyd blogged a few months ago on Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. She had observed that

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.

My anecdotal observation is very consistent with hers. The class division also explains why Silicon Valley (a very “hegemonic” class) never understood MySpace. MySpace’s rise had first taken them completely by surprise, when they were only paying attention to Tribe, Orkut, Xanga, etc. (Friendster already had its fame and was imploding at the time.) They grudgingly pay MySpace some respect after its $600M+ acquisition. Now that Facebook is the new hot social network, the Silicon Valley crowd is quick to dismiss MySpace again.

Unfortunately, Danah didn’t have any quantitative data to back up her observations. So I started to gather some data for Facebook and want to share them here. Since it’s only Facebook data, it doesn’t help in comparing Facebook with MySpace. However, the trend on Facebook alone is still interesting, and it’s not inconsistent with Danah’s argument either.

The tool of my data gathering effort is Facebook’s network browsing function: http://www.facebook.com/networks/networks.php?view=hs.

Let me use International Studies Academy (ISA) in San Francisco, where I went for high school, as the first example. Going to this network’s homepage promptly shows a message that “The content on this Network page is restricted to members of this network only. Only current high school students can join high school networks,” which is fine since the only info I care about is already shown on the homepage.

That is, 52 current students at ISA are on Facebook. It’s a pretty low number. Ok… yeah… my high school is pretty ghetto. It’s not really the Facebook crowd. But let’s be more rigorous in correlating its ghetto-ness with Facebook usage. Looking at ISA’s profile page at greatschools.net, we see that the school has 421 students, giving it a Facebook penetration rate of 52/421=12%. The site also gives my high school a “GreatSchools Rating” of 4… out of a possible 10 😦

I next do the same analysis for the nerdiest high school in San Francisco – Lowell High School. Its FB penetration rate is 65% and its GreatSchools Rating is a perfect 10. Let’s look at a few more public high schools in San Francisco since I’m familiar with the school district.

School	FB penetration rate	GreatSchools Rating
Lowell	65%	10
Abraham Lincoln	37%	8
School of the Arts	56%	7
George Washington	34%	7
Balboa	35%	6
Wallenberg	22%	6
Phillip Burton	16%	6
Thurgood Marshall	22%	5
Mission	12%	4
ISA	12%	4
Independence High	0% (no FB entry)	4

The correlation between FB usage and high school quality is quite good. Now, it would be nice to correlate Facebook usage with socio-economic class rather than just high school quality. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any stat for average household income for different high schools. Instead let’s assume going to a private high school represents a higher socio-economic class. The FB penetration rates for some of the private high schools in SF are:

School	FB penetration rate
Sacred Heart	98%
St. Ignatius	64%
Mercy	47%
Riordan	35%

So being in a private high school or in a highly rated public one is very predictive of one being in Facebook as well. I’ve only presented data for San Francisco, but a similar analysis can be done for high schools across the U.S. (It only takes more time.) I believe the conclusion will be the same.

Again, I haven’t gathered any data on MySpace, so it’s still possible that Danah’s hypothesis is wrong. MySpace usage may in fact increase for students in private/”good” high schools too. My intuition is that Danah is right though, and hopefully I’ll get around to collecting some MySpace data to prove it one way or the other.

Update: I found some MySpace data and have done further analysis. See my post here.

Update 2: Teresa Klein over at webcommunityforum.com did some further statistical analysis and found a correlation coefficient of 0.87 between FaceBook penetration rate and GreatSchools Rating for the San Francisco public schools listed above. Better yet, she repeated the analysis for Seattle high schools and found a correlation coefficient of 0.79 there. The pattern seems to be holding. See her post here.