Social comparison is such an important topic to explore, so I was interested to see your approach to it.

In the end, you found your hypothesized difference on identity clarity, but there were no significant group difference on identity distress or social comparison. Why do you think that identity clarity is where the difference showed up? Do you think there’s a reason the other variables were more stable across class years?

I was interested in looking at you all’s study because the study my group did for the identity seminar is similar when it came to looking at social media as an influence of identity development. It was interesting that you got significant results for identity clarity. The explanation of seniors having a more clear sense of self makes sense. I wonder if a study was done comparing those who just left college to those currently in college would have different scores on identity clarity.

Very interesting topic area. Social comparison is relevant to a lot of important areas in our lives, including identity development. I know you all focused on college-aged students. Do you think looking at even younger participants would have changed anything? For example, looking at middle-school and high-school aged participants? I am wondering if social media might play more of a role in their lives than college-aged students.

Hello everyone! I love your topic. Social comparison is such a huge problem with the prevalence of social media today. I think it is great that you guys decided to do your project on this topic. I also enjoyed reading the data knowing that it was from college aged students, I think this age group can relate the strongest to this topic. The data showing that the results for identity clarity were significant was kind of surprising to me at first, but then I thought about it and understood the explanation. Great work everyone!

Very interesting topic! It was neat to see both social comparison of opinion and ability being analyzed, as this is something not normally shown. I would be interested to see how sophomore and junior students would rank in this research. Do you think there would be a significant difference? Awesome job on the presentation!

I think that this is a very interesting presentation on something that is becoming more and more relevant as technology has become more and more advanced and so has social media along with it. Social Media is also something that has become more accessible to people, overall this is a topic that I found very relevant to society today. I appreciate the different dimensions of identity that you looked at and also appreciated how many hypotheses you had formed when running this experiment. I agree with Dr. Kolar that applying this to lower age groups would be a very interesting area to look into.

Your topic is super interesting and very relevant today as so many students, college aged, and younger are active on social media! I know you focused on differences between freshmen and seniors in college, do you believe there would be a significant difference between freshmen and juniors in regard to identity clarity? Or do you think senior year helps solidify individual’s sense of self as they have almost finished their degree? Or perhaps it is the college experience that influences’ one sense of self and juniors would score significantly higher than freshmen in terms of identity clarity too? Just curious to see when this difference in levels of identity clarity occurs!

This is a super neat study! Social comparison on social media is a relatively new area of research, but its a super important one — especially in college students where so much identity growth takes place. Did you all record how much time the participants spent on social media? I wonder the amount of time spent on social media intensifies the social comparison that occurs. Great work!!

Really great study! you explained everything effectively in the short amount of time. For future research, looking at 5 year senior and checking to see is there is a significant between those type of seniors. Also looking between seniors and juniors.

I think this is a great topic to talk about. I think it would have helped to have the same amount of seniors as freshman, but I know obviously that is very hard to do or at least have about the same number of each. I also thought that social media social comparison would be higher in freshman then in seniors. Now a days I feel like kids are on social media a lot more than they use to. Do you think this would affect your findings if you did this study on different generations of kids?

Great study guys! I really enjoyed your topic overall and I think that you did a great job with thoroughly explaining your study! In regards to your findings, I did not find it that unusual to see that Seniors and First Year students did not significantly differ in their scores of identity distress. Being a senior myself, I find that right now I am struggling quite a bit with my sense of self, what is my life’s purpose after school? I find myself comparing what I want to do and what others want to do in life a lot for fear that I am not up to par with my peers. Once again great study, and cool findings!