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Careers, education & training Does Facebook make you fatter?
Time spent on social networking sites comes at the expense of
other activities – including physical activity. That is the
suggestion of a study being presented today at the Annual
Conference of the British Psychological Society’s Division of
Health Psychology in Liverpool. The study carried out at the
University of Ulster by Masters degree student Emer O’Leary
under the supervision of psychologists Dr Wendy Cousins and Dr
Tadhg Macintyre asked 353 students to complete an online survey
measuring social networking activity and levels of physical
activity. The results showed that the vast majority of students
used social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter spending
an average of one hour a day online. When it came to the results
from the physical activity questionnaire, just over half the
students were classified as ‘moderately active; and a third were
‘high activity’, with a minority (1