College Student Sampling: Can it Represent Social Media Use by the Work Force?

Research across disciplines examines the dynamics underpinning social behaviors that occur on social media. Sociologists and psychologists analyze social media impact on social life and human relationships. Marketing research focuses on user profiling in order to improve and predict sales. IS research looks at social media for increasing employee performance. These studies make great strides towards understanding networked social behavior. However, like research in many fields, there is a heavy reliance on a non-representative sample population; most empirical studies have been conducted using college students. In this paper, we argue that such sampling does not necessarily reflect the use of social media by employees. This limits the generalizability of past results. Our claims are supported by a large qualitative study contrasting full-time college students with full-time workers in terms of social media use.