p with the report
3.1 Survey Results
3.1.1 Graph Legend Summary
There are a few types of graphs used in this report. They should not be too hard to understand, but in case you need a legend especially for the bar graphs, read on:
- Pie charts contain labels according to color, and are usually in percent (if with %) or number of survey responses if just the number;
- Bar charts contain labels for the item tallied as well as the tally total in number of survey responses;
3.2 Survey Launch and Responses
The survey was launched on Tuesday November 20, 2007 at 6pm EST. The link was sent to my immediate family members as well as posted on Facebook (via a Note) and included in my MSN name. No other promotion was done.
Above is a graph showing the rate of survey submission from November 20 until December 12th. The most surveys were filled in within 5 days of the survey launch, however there is a long tail of a few responses each day stretching into December.
To view a graph of survey responses recieved during the first day and a half at 10 minute intevals, click here.
There were 192 survey responses received during this time frame. I am quite impressed, as this is far larger than my social circle many times over. This demonstrates the amazing power of social networks, to allow for such a massive reach with so little effort.
Responses came in from all over the world. Since myself and most of my friends are located in Canada, about half of results (88) came in from there (31 of which came from my town of Ottawa). But more than half of the results were from people elsewhere in the world. Our neighbor to the south, the United States, submitted 76 results, 20 results were received from Europe (including 6 from England), 4 results from Australia, one from New Zealand, and only 2 results came from the entirety of Asia (both from South Korea). It seems that knowledge of the English language is a key requirement for my social network.
A breakdown of responders' ages are shown above. 42% of responders were in the 18-25 age group, and as the age groups get larger, the number of responses drops. A similar pattern is shown in the non-grouped data chart. However this chart identifies a few points of interest:
- The single-largest response group were 21 year olds, which is my age. It seems that my social network is based largely around those I know and am close to in real life.
- 46 responses were from those 36 years of age and above; however I can only think of a fraction of that number of people I actually know in real life who fit that age. My social network must then also include people who I don't know well or at all in real life. These people could be friends of friends, coworkers, etc.
I will not be going in depth about Facebook's exact user statistics or how those relate to my study findings, however another blogger has taken a look at the Facebook demographic more closely, you may view his results here. I will however note that 6,650,860 Canadians are using Facebook, with 22,939,600 eligible people* this makes for an impressive 29% adoption rate. Compared to the States' rate of 7.4% (18,071,700 Facebook users with 242,903,000 eligible people**), Canadians are really getting into Facebook at an amazingly quick pace.
Continue reading the Survey Results Page 2
* I've defined this as anyone over 15 years old, although I have noticed now that Facebook's age limit is 13. The number is from the Canadian 2007 Census.
**Same definition as above, but the data is from the USA Census.gov site.