What Exactly are College Students Looking At?

        Recently there has been rising concern over what type of sites college students spend their time looking at with their direct Internet access. Many conservative parents are fearful that they will make use of the many pornographic web sites. As a response legislative bills have been passed that would require public colleges and universities to install censuring software that would limit access of minors to this inappropriate material.    However, the counter side of this movement argues that if laws restrict college "minors" to sites, there will be many technical problems as scholars and adult learners would be denied as well.

    While such apprehension may be warranted, no studies have been done to verify this fear.  Yet, recently a study done by Anna C. McFadden (1999) at the University of Alabama was done to determine the nature of Internet uses by students in a campus computer lab. The researchers focused on six computers in specific and after a period of time copied their caches to categorize the type of web sites students visited.  It is important to note that in this study that "percentage of hits" meant the number of sites contacted by a user and not the amount of time the computer was used.  Also, the researchers developed an inclusive grouping called "General" that included sites related to course activities, research, and personal interests.  The results read as follows:

        As the results of this study show, the majority of time spend on the Web at a university computer lab by students involves class-related sites.  Also, it is possible that course related projects as well as personal issues may have accounted for the high use in e-mail.  It is interesting to note that the CNN and other news sites (1%) warranted as much traffic as those of a sex related nature (1%).  This snapshot of college student computer use on the Internet serves to calm the worries of those conservatives who fear that today's students spend all their time looking at digital pinups rather than class notes.
 

Other Student Links:
Main Student Page
Minorities' views
Classroom Experience
 
                                                                                                                                                                                     

 This project was produced for Psy 380, Social Psychology of Cyberspace, Spring 2000,  at Miami University.  All graphics in these pages are used with permission or under fair use guidelines, are in the public domain,  or were created by the authors.  Last revised:  This document has been accessed   times since 1 May 2000.  Comments & Questions to R. Sherman