Facebook: Relationships and Happiness [STUDY]

Posted on Feb 16, 2010 in Facebook, Social Media

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Facebook Data team released information on relationships and happiness. The use of positive and negative words were examined in the status updates of Facebook users over the course of one week in January. According to the Facebook Data team, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research and they utilize computers to count words and remove personally identifiable info. I had no idea Facebook did this kind of research.

Overall, the data is not that surprising:  people who are in a relationship or married seem to be happier than everyone else. When you look at the differences between men and women, the guys tend to be more negative when married or engaged. Oh, the poor fellas…

What do you think of these results? If you’re married or in a relationship, do you feel that your status updates are “happier” than when you were single?

  • http://www.erinburry.com/ Erin Burry

    This is really interesting. Do they have the data for those who opt out of specifying their relationship, or are they counted as singles? For example, I know of people who are in extremely healthy relationships, but they don't have any relationship classification on Facebook.

  • Josh Martin

    From what I remember, for those who didn't specify their relationship status they categorized them as “undisclosed” and didn't include them in the singles category. Do you think a lot of people are starting to opt out of disclosing personal info on Facebook, like relationship status?

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  • http://ilikebigputts.com Josh Martin

    From what I remember, for those who didn't specify their relationship status they categorized them as “undisclosed” and didn't include them in the singles category. Do you think a lot of people are starting to opt out of disclosing personal info on Facebook, like relationship status?