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Sampling Bias in LinkedIn: A Case Study

Published: 11 April 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes a case study of sampling bias in LinkedIn, a major professional social network. The study collected a sample of 1,989 STEM students who graduated from a major public university between 2002 and 2014. Overall, 40\% of the graduates had a LinkedIn profile in summer of 2015. It was observed that LinkedIn participation significantly fluctuated among different majors, and ranged from 30\% for biochemistry majors to 51\% for information science majors. Year of graduation, gender, and grade point average surprisingly did not seem to create a large difference in LinkedIn participation. These results should be useful for design and interpretation of empirical studies which use LinkedIn data or select participants from LinkedIn social network.

References

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A. Archambault and J. Grudin. A longitudinal study of facebook, linkedin, & twitter use. In SIGCHI, 2012.
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O. Barzilay, O. Hazzan, and A. Yehudai. Using social media to study the diversity of example usage among professional developers. In SIGSOFT, 2011.
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N. Unkelos-Shpigel, S. Sherman, and I. Hadar. Finding the missing link to industry: Linkedin professional groups as facilitators of empirical research. In International Workshop on CESI, 2015.
[4]
R. E. Wilson, S. D. Gosling, and L. T. Graham. A review of facebook research in the social sciences. Perspectives on psychological science, 7(3):203--220, 2012.
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T. H. Wonnacott and R. J. Wonnacott. Introductory statistics, volume 19690. Wiley New York, 1972.
[6]
Y. Xu, Z. Li, A. Gupta, A. Bugdayci, and A. Bhasin. Modeling professional similarity by mining professional career trajectories. In KDD, 2014.

Cited By

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  • (2021)LinkedIn Students: An Extension of LinkedIn Designed for College Students to Enhance Their Job-Hunting ExperienceDesign for Tomorrow—Volume 110.1007/978-981-16-0041-8_36(423-435)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2021
  • (2017)The Value of an Undergraduate HRD Degree: An Exploratory Investigation of Perceived Employability and Career SuccessAdvances in Developing Human Resources10.1177/152342231769523019:2(190-206)Online publication date: Mar-2017
  • (2016)Career Trajectory Analysis of Information Technology AlumniProceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/2978192.2978221(2-6)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2016

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  1. Sampling Bias in LinkedIn: A Case Study

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '16 Companion: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web
    April 2016
    1094 pages
    ISBN:9781450341448
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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    International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee

    Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

    Publication History

    Published: 11 April 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. gender
    2. gpa
    3. linkedin
    4. major
    5. sampling bias
    6. year

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    WWW '16
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    • IW3C2
    WWW '16: 25th International World Wide Web Conference
    April 11 - 15, 2016
    Québec, Montréal, Canada

    Acceptance Rates

    WWW '16 Companion Paper Acceptance Rate 115 of 727 submissions, 16%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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    View all
    • (2021)LinkedIn Students: An Extension of LinkedIn Designed for College Students to Enhance Their Job-Hunting ExperienceDesign for Tomorrow—Volume 110.1007/978-981-16-0041-8_36(423-435)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2021
    • (2017)The Value of an Undergraduate HRD Degree: An Exploratory Investigation of Perceived Employability and Career SuccessAdvances in Developing Human Resources10.1177/152342231769523019:2(190-206)Online publication date: Mar-2017
    • (2016)Career Trajectory Analysis of Information Technology AlumniProceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/2978192.2978221(2-6)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2016

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