Accessibility and generalizability: Are social media effects moderated by age or digital literacy?
Accessibility and generalizability: Are social media effects moderated by age or digital literacy?
复制标题
可访问性和普遍性：社交媒体的影响是否受到年龄或数字素养的调节？
作者：
Kevin Munger;Ishita Gopal;Jonathan Nagler;Joshua A. Tucker
一个新出现的经验规律表明，老年人使用和回应社交媒体与年轻人非常不同。老年人是美国互联网和社交媒体用户中增长最快的群体，这种异质性很快将成为网络政治的核心。然而，这一领域的许多重要实验都是在网上样本上进行的，这些样本中没有足够的老年人，无法用于推广到当前的互联网用户群体;即使是几年前的研究，这个问题也更加明显。在本文中，我们报告了复制两个实验的结果，涉及社交媒体（特别是Facebook）上进行的一个这样的样本缺乏老年用户（亚马逊的土耳其机械）使用的在线主题的来源，其中包含足够的变化，受试者年龄。我们增加了一组标准问题，旨在明确衡量数字素养。我们发现的证据显着的治疗效果异质性受试者的年龄和数字素养的复制的两个实验之一。这一结果是一个例子的局限性进行的研究样本的选择与治疗效果的异质性的普遍性;具体来说，这一结果表明，土耳其机械不应该被用来招募受试者时，研究人员怀疑治疗效果异质性的年龄或数字素养，因为我们认为应该是数字媒体的影响研究的情况。
An emerging empirical regularity suggests that older people use and respond to social media very differently than younger people. Older people are the fastest-growing population of Internet and social media users in the US, and this heterogeneity will soon become central to online politics. However, many important experiments in this field have been conducted on online samples that do not contain enough older people to be useful to generalize to the current population of Internet users; this issue is more pronounced for studies that are even a few years old. In this paper, we report the results of replicating two experiments involving social media (specifically, Facebook) conducted on one such sample lacking older users (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) using a source of online subjects which does contain sufficient variation in subject age. We add a standard battery of questions designed to explicitly measure digital literacy. We find evidence of significant treatment effect heterogeneity in subject age and digital literacy in the replication of one of the two experiments. This result is an example of limitations to generalizability of research conducted on samples where selection is related to treatment effect heterogeneity; specifically, this result indicates that Mechanical Turk should not be used to recruit subjects when researchers suspect treatment effect heterogeneity in age or digital literacy, as we argue should be the case for research on digital media effects.