Beliefs, Exams and Social Media: A Study of Girls and Boys in the UK

Social media diffusion amongst tween and teenagers keeps increasing year on year and involving younger and younger children and studies have begun to appear indicating several changes in adolescent behaviour and mental health corresponding with increased social media use (Twenge, 2017; Twenge et al., 2017). Data derived from social media is also increasingly used to predict a variety of outcomes including personality (Youyou at al., 2014) and mental health (De Choudhury et al., 2013). We investigate the determinants of social media use and the connection between social media and teenagers' beliefs about education, which are known to be strongly connected to educational outcomes. We construct a representative sample of UK teenagers from British survey data and a sample of Twitter data specifically collected around the first national secondary school exam taken at age 16, which have important effects for further educational choices. Building on literature addressing the factors influencing teen's educational expectations (Anders and Micklewright, 2015) and the construction of beliefs (Gennaioli and Schleifer, 2010; Corazzini et al, 2010; Oxoby, 2014; Coffman, 2014; Alesina et al, 2015; Bordalo et al, 2016a; Bordalo et al. 2016b), we model social media use in the representative sample. We identify significant associations between differential usage (at both the extensive and intensive margin) and controls (socio-demographics, parental inputs and children cognitive and non-cognitive skills), particularly indicating that intensive social media usage is indeed associated with a range of negative factors as found in research on US teens (Twenge, 2017). We also find that beliefs become more gender stereotypical with age, and more so the more tweens and teens are in social media. We then use social network modelling to investigate dynamics in the Twitter sample, and identify significant gender differences in social media communication patterns and moods pertaining to scientific subjects, which indicate social media contribute to educational beliefs, potentially biasing them through the propagation of gender stereotypes.