Experimental Design
In order to analyze the effects of social media on news awareness, consumption behavior, time allocation and subjective wellbeing the first step is to recover how much people value social media. It is not enough to just call for volunteers for an experiment that closes access to Facebook for a week, since the people that will likely volunteer are those that value Facebook the least. Using a selected sample of volunteers to estimate the effects of not accessing Facebook on the proposed outcomes will yield results that are not generalizable, not even to the population of college students. Thus, it is important to understand the mechanism behind this selection process.
In this sense, the first step of this protocol is to implement a recruitment mechanism that allows to recover the distribution of the value of Facebook in the potential population. Then, we can use this distribution to understand the selection process into the experiment and potentially we could use the valuation distribution to weight the estimates to obtain more externally valid results.
Recruitment mechanism
Participants for this study will be selected from the population of Texas A&M students (graduate and undergraduate) in the College Station campus.
In order to enroll the participants for this study we will apply the following procedure designed to recover the distribution of the value Facebook has for college students:
1. Send a massive email to Texas A&M students in the College Station campus indicating the general characteristics of the experiment. The email includes a link that directs the reader to a Qualtrics survey web page where we will select participants using the BDM mechanism.
2. The first screen in Qualtrics will collect basic demographic information (gender, age in years, major, zip code/country of birth) and will explain briefly the main ideas of the experiment.
3. In the second screen, subjects are explained the functioning of the selection mechanism.
4. The third screen displays only a field to capture the student’s valuation of her time on Facebook, with a description.
5. The forth screen presents the random counter offer. For the case where the counter offer is greater or equal than the valuation, the screen will indicate that the subject has been preselected to participate, that we are going to randomly select the final participants who will be paid the counter offer at the end of the experiment, will provide information on the date and location of the experimental session, will indicate that email reminders will be sent before the experiment, and it will request for the participant’s email address. For the case where the counter offer is less than the valuation, the screen will thank the participant for filling his valuation and basic data.
Experimental Sessions
Treatment
All participants will fill a survey collecting information about the outcomes before the interventions. Half of the participants will be randomly chosen not to access their Facebook (both the news feed and Facebook messenger) for a period of 1 week.
For the treated group, we will implement the following procedure to log them off Facebook:
1. Before the session, we will create a Facebook account for the experiment.
2. Provide participants access to laptop computer.
3. Ask the participants to become Facebook friends with the experiment’s account.
4. Guide each participant through the procedure of logging off from every device where his/her accounts are active using Facebook’s controls.
5. The experimental account will be permanently closed at the end of the experiment.