In Search of Lost Profiles: The Reliability of VKontakte Data and Its Importance for Educational Research

Smirnov, Ivan; Sivak, Elizaveta; Kozmina, Yana

doi:10.17323/1814-9545-2016-4-106-122

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The anonymized data then undergoes further investigations. Approach effectiveness and the lack of significant bias were demonstrated by Smirnov, Sivak & Kozmina [2016].…”

Section: Interest Research Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

What’s in My Profile: VKontakte Data as a Tool for Studying the Interests of Modern Teenagers

Polivanova¹,

Smirnov²

2017

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Abstract. Children's interests play a key role in their psychological development. However, research in this field is associated with serious methodological problems, as it has traditionally used questionnaire surveys that cannot adequately describe the diverse and dynamic world of interests of a developing person. The article suggests using the information on VKontakte communities followed by teenagers, in order to explore their interests. Apart from being comprehensive, Vkontakte data is, unlike questionnaire answers, also uncensored. The method's potential demonstrated through the example of a Moscow school with 674 students following 20,203 various VKontakte communities. It reveals that teenagers' interests vary depending on their gender, age, and academic performance. The degree of such variance is demonstrated on an extended set of data on the interests of 290,182 VKontakte users. It transpires that communities followed by teenagers predict with high accuracy not only their gender (97%) and age (98%) but also the performance of the schools they attend (83%). The findings point to the heterogeneity of age-related behavior patterns, in particular to their correlation with gender and academic achievements. Acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of interests and the diversity of age-related behavior patterns creates conditions for the further development of student-centered education, in the absence of which education is becoming more and more alienated from real life, ignoring the interests of real people.

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“…The anonymized data then undergoes further investigations. Approach effectiveness and the lack of significant bias were demonstrated by Smirnov, Sivak & Kozmina [2016].…”

Section: Interest Research Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

What’s in My Profile: VKontakte Data as a Tool for Studying the Interests of Modern Teenagers

Polivanova¹,

Smirnov²

2017

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“…We then perform requests to VK API to obtain the lists of all users who were born in 2001 and indicate that they are studying in one of the schools from our sample. To exclude users who provided false information about their school, we remove profiles with no friends from the same school, as previously recommended [31]. We also exclude students who indicate several schools in their profiles.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schools are segregated by educational outcomes in the digital space

Smirnov

2019

PLoS ONE

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The Internet provides students with a unique opportunity to connect and maintain social ties with peers from other schools, irrespective of how far they are from each other. However, little is known about the real structure of such online relationships. In this paper, we investigate the structure of interschool friendship on a popular social networking site. We use data from 36, 951 students from 590 schools of a large European city. We find that the probability of a friendship tie between students from neighboring schools is high and that it decreases with the distance between schools following the power law. We also find that students are more likely to be connected if the educational outcomes of their schools are similar. We show that this fact is not a consequence of residential segregation. While high- and low-performing schools are evenly distributed across the city, this is not the case for the digital space, where schools turn out to be segregated by educational outcomes. There is no significant correlation between the educational outcomes of a school and its geographical neighbors; however, there is a strong correlation between the educational outcomes of a school and its digital neighbors. These results challenge the common assumption that the Internet is a borderless space, and may have important implications for the understanding of educational inequality in the digital age.

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“…We excluded users who have no VK friends from the same educational institution that was indicated in their profile. It was previously shown that this is an effective way to remove fake user profiles [13].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Digital Flynn Effect: Complexity of Posts on Social Media Increases over Time

Smirnov

2017

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Parents and teachers often express concern about the extensive use of social media by youngsters. Some of them see emoticons, undecipherable initialisms and loose grammar typical for social media as evidence of language degradation. In this paper, we use a simple measure of text complexity to investigate how the complexity of public posts on a popular social networking site changes over time. We analyze a unique dataset that contains texts posted by 942, 336 users from a large European city across nine years. We show that the chosen complexity measure is correlated with the academic performance of users: users from high-performing schools produce more complex texts than users from low-performing schools. We also find that complexity of posts increases with age. Finally, we demonstrate that overall language complexity of posts on the social networking site is constantly increasing. We call this phenomenon the digital Flynn effect. Our results may suggest that the worries about language degradation are not warranted.

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In Search of Lost Profiles: The Reliability of VKontakte Data and Its Importance for Educational Research

Cited by 10 publications

References 24 publications

What’s in My Profile: VKontakte Data as a Tool for Studying the Interests of Modern Teenagers

What’s in My Profile: VKontakte Data as a Tool for Studying the Interests of Modern Teenagers

Schools are segregated by educational outcomes in the digital space

The Digital Flynn Effect: Complexity of Posts on Social Media Increases over Time

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