What Impact Does An App Have

What Impact does an App have on the amount of time spent on Facebook? I. IntroductionSocial Media is now a new form of communication. It has introduced a new way of interacting with one another, keeping up with the world, family and friends, and passing time. Indu stated that, “There are more Facebook users (350 million) in the U. s then there are anywhere else” (Implications of social media (Facebook and Whats App) among the students of Maharishi Dayanand University Rohtak,p. 1,2018). On average, a person spend 50 minutes a day on the Facebook app according to a chart in the article, People spend almost as much time on Instagram as they do on Facebook (Molla & Wagner, 2018). The reason for this information is to explore a single subject design of: Can the mobile app 'Quality Time' assist with decreasing Brittney’s time spent on Facebook?

Materials and Methods

The participant

Brittany Swain who is a twenty-nine-year-old, wife and mother of three children is a hard-working woman. She attended Tarleton State University for two years in the bachelor’s program and was enrolled in the Master of Social Work program but unfortunately quit after 4-week in. The identified behavior for change is that she spends too much time on face. As you can see she was very busy however, in saying this she has a lot of in between time when she is on the go so what she does to fill the spurts of time is get on Facebook and scroll on the lives of many. Brittany would like to spend less time on Facebook, but it is a simple thing to do when she is bored, and she knows if she spends less time on Facebook she could be more productive in other areas such as school work.

The appI found an app called Quality Time that tracks the usage of all Apps. The app allows you to set a certain amount of usage for each day on each app. After the limit of usage has been reached a notification as seen in Photo 1 will pop up and remind the participant of the amount of time they have set. I decided to use this app because it was a way that could measure the amount of time without being forged or changed. It always tracks the amount of time and it was more reliable then taking a log manually.

Part A: Baseline Phase In this scenario, we will only be looking at the usage of the Facebook app on Brittney’s phone. I monitored the usage by reading the app on her phone after the baseline phase of eight days was completed. I was able to see any day that I wanted, and the app showed me how many minutes, hours, and times she spent on Facebook a day. I measured Brittany’s duration, which refers to the measurement each time and event or symptom occurs and for how long, (Engel & Schutt, 2009)for eight days with no usage limit on her Facebook App. I only tracked the amount of time she spent on Facebook not the amount of times she was on Facebook. I did this because I felt if I had the amount of time to show that it would be more effective then the amount of times to Brittany to show her how much of her day she spends on Facebook. I could not find any studies on using this app to decrease the time on Facebook, but I believe this app is valid and reliable as it is all connected to your phone and is backed up when setting up an account. The app itself has 4. 2 stars with 12 thousand reviews (ZeroDesktop Inc, 2015) making it reliable due to the usage of other individuals on the app that had positive feedback and reviews. Quality Time is an automatic timeline within your phone and it tracks everything, so nothing can be missed.

Intervention Phase I implemented this app to her to provide intervention and reduce the time she spends on Facebook. On Quality Time you can set a usage limit for each App to prevent from spending too much time on it After the eighth day I went into the app on her phone and reviewed the time and decided that I would set the usage limit of 1 hour per day on Brittany’s phone to the Facebook app itself.

Regarding level, the intervention suggests that the limit of one-hour usage has only made the problem worse. Chart A determines that the trend is linear, because of the baseline it is ascending straight. In Chart B the trend is descending. So, in reaction to the trend, the intervention suggests that there has been an improvement of Brittany spending less time on Facebook. Chart A determines that the variability has a range of 1. 066667 hours (1 hour and 4 minutes) and in Chart B the variability has a range of 1. 266667 hours(1 hour and 16 minutes).

So, in reference to the variability, the intervention has only made the behavior worse. According to the level, trend, and variability the intervention did not work. As far as I could see there was no pattern to when she spent less time on Facebook so trying to find a common occurrence of why she spent so much time on Facebook was not applicable.

Application of Design

The strengths of this single subject design are that the amount spent on Facebook on her phone was measured accurately. The weakness in this single- subject design is that the app was only installed to her phone, so the amount spent on other devices such as laptops, desktops, and other electronics was not measured their fore the results were not complete. Another weakness is that the intervention phase was only measured for 1 week and a day instead of the full two-week 14-day period it was supposed to be measured at, so the intervention could have had more effect the longer it was in place. Lastly, another weakness was that the usage alert that pooped up did not close access to Facebook. Brittany could simply ignore the alert and continue to browse on Facebook.

So, this did not allow for proper intervention as I later found out. These findings cannot be generalized to a larger population because these finding are solely based on Brittany’s time spent on Facebook and not more participants. It is not even guaranteed that everyone has a Facebook account so they’re for that population these findings would be useless.

Conclusion

I have learned in doing this subject-design research project that in implementing an intervention does not mean that it will improve the behavior. Instead it may make it worse then it was before the intervention. To change a behavior, the participant has to be persistent of the behavior when it comes to repeating behavior or passing up the behavior. I have learned that I do not like research because I am not a person that has to find out the 5 W’s. I just want to know the answer and to continue with my life. Research makes you go into depth and ask questions that I do not necessarily need to know outside of research. This may affect me in the future as a social worker because research is an important aspect of social work so all though I do not like it I will have to know how to do it. I also have learned what the variability, trend, and level is regarding single subject- design research. The implication is that the intervention of the Quality Time app did not lower the amount of time Brittany spent on Facebook.