Prompt 4

BY: MELISSA

I found a blog related to my field of study, psychology, where there are many different, and may I say random, posts about topics such as “10 Lazy Ways to Appear Smarter” or “6 Purely Psychological Effects of Washing Your Hands.” This blog may be one of the top rated psychology blogs rated on the internet but how do we know that it is a reliable source of information if it is written in a blog? My first reaction to this site would be that it is a very unreliable source because of the types of articles found and the set up of the home page. But as I dug deeper I found the “About PsyBlog” page and discovered that this blog is founded and run by a Dr. Jeremy Dean, a psychologist with a degree in law and three more degrees in psychology, the latest being a doctorate. 

On the other note, I decided to find a scholarly article in the field of psychology as well. The one I found was published in September 2013 called “Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach” I read about the study where they took 75,000 words and phrases from social media statuses and messages and proceeded to find lots of differences in categories pertaining to personality, gender, and age. This article was co-written by eleven authors who attended a variety of prestigious universities, some including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge.

This study is mainly focused around social media. It is not an unknown fact that Facebook and Twitter are very popular social media sites, but did you know that they are widely used by more than 1/7^th of the world’s population? Through these two examples of social media, people act, talk, and react uniquely through what they publicly post. The authors focus on these posts and how certain words or phrases in them can determine things such as gender, age, and personality. 

They concluded that status updates and tweet updates contain personal and emotional content. People are allowed to use any language they desire on these sites which psychologists believe show characteristics of their unspoken feelings and concerns. At the end of the article an important point is brought up stating, “ Under different contexts, it is likely some results would differ. Still, the sample sizes and availability of demographic information afforded by social media bring us closer to a more ideal representative sample (Personality 14).” This is a disclosure saying that the study did not include every post ever posted on Facebook or Twitter and how the sample size of this study brought us closer to that conclusion. 

In conclusion, there are many reasons that both the blog and the scholarly article are credible. The first being that the blog has a psychologist with a doctorate running it, while the scholarly article has multiple credible authors co-writing it. The blog is very visually appealing and catches the eye while the scholarly article looks very boring and is 16 pages long. But I have concluded that both sources supply valid information in the field of psychology even though they have very different styles of delivery.

"PsyBlog - OSC IB Blogs." OSC IB Blogs. N.p., 21 Nov. 2011. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. <http://blogs.osc-ib.com/2011/12/ib-teacher-blogs/dp_psychology/psyblog/>.