The influence of social media on eyewitness accounts

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to see if the description of a suspect by a witness is affected by the witness' use of social media. Using data from the surveys that were administered to two classes, a Pearson's r correlation analysis was used to predict that the accuracy of the description is inversely proportional to the time spent on social media. The statistics show that the use of social media, emailing, and text messaging is steadily rising. The dependent variable is the accuracy of respondent's description of the individual. The independent variable is an ordinal scale constructed from time spent on the use of social media and membership. One of the main benefits of this study is how relatively new it is to the criminal justice and human behavioral fields. Results indicated that the null hypothesis could not be rejected. However seven items comprising the dependent variable were found to be statistically significant predictors of the hypothesis.