Are you on Facebook? In a recent study, Eric P.S. Baumer, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University, set out to explore the demographic and socioeconomic factors that impact Facebook use and non-use.

There are approximately 214 million active Facebook users in the U.S. For perspective, around 68 percent of the country’s adult population has an account with the social media site.

For demographers, Facebook’s immense usership raises a few questions: What types of people use Facebook? What kinds of people do not? What different kinds of Facebook users are there? And how much can we draw conclusions about general social phenomena from Facebook user data?

While Baumer is not the first to research the demographics of Facebook usership, his new study takes a uniquely nuanced approach to these phenomena. This means looking at Facebook usership in non-binary terms.

A binary approach would categorize people simply as users or non-users, which, Baumer suggested, is too reductive.

“Think about the people you know,” he said.

“If you ask each of them, ‘Do you use Facebook?’ there will probably be some who respond, ‘Well, I have an account, but I don’t really use it for anything.’”

That is, Facebook use varies from person to person. While some visit the site every day, some may only visit the site on occasion. Others may have deactivated their page or are considering deactivation.

Baumer combed through data collected by Cornell University’s Survey Research Institute in 2015 for the Cornell National Social Survey, which includes responses from 1,000 U.S. households gleaned from a phone survey of adults 18 years or older. Importantly, the data is self-reported, which restricted the scope of the study somewhat.

“It’s important to keep in mind the limitations that come with self-report survey data,” said Baumer.

“Furthermore, we only asked about the kinds of non-use for which Facebook provides technical mechanisms: deactivation and deletion.

“There are plenty of other interesting approaches I’ve seen in other studies I’ve conducted, such as asking a friend to change your password, installing software that blocks access to specific websites, or simply never logging in despite having an account, that wouldn’t show up here.”

With these parameters, Baumer settled on four distinct categories of Facebook use.

• Current User, a person who currently has and uses a Facebook account;

• Deactivated, a person who has temporarily deactivated her or his account but could technically reactivate at any time;

• Considered Deactivating, a person who has considered deactivating her or his account but has never actually done so; and

• Never Used, a person who has never had a Facebook account.

Using probabilistic modeling, a method for determining probable outcomes based on random variables, Baumer set out to identify predictors for these four categories based on socioeconomic and demographic factors.

From his analysis, he found eight distinct factors that functioned as predictors: age, gender, marital status, whether the respondent had looked for work in the past four weeks, household income, race, weight and social ideology (liberal to conservative).

Of these, four functioned as especially strong predictors: age, gender, whether the respondent had looked for work in the past four weeks, and household income.

The results showed that current Facebook use is most common among people who are middle-aged (40 to 60), female, not seeking employment, of Asian descent, or currently married.

People who are younger, seeking employment, or not married are most likely to have either deactivated their account or were considering it.

Those who have never had a Facebook account, meanwhile, are typically older, male, from a lower income household, African American, more socially conservative, or weigh less.

Baumer said that there are two main takeaways from the study.

“First, Facebook users are not demographically representative of or commensurate with other kinds of population samples,” he said.

“Thus, studying social interactions on Facebook can provide important insights about social interactions on Facebook, but gaining deeper insights into underlying aspects of human social behavior requires comparative analyses across lots of different samples and populations.”

That is, social media data can’t accurately be extrapolated to the broader population.

In a statement, Baumer emphasized that Facebook users are more often older, female, higher income earners, and ideologically liberal.

The second major takeaway that Baumer highlighted has to do with the relationship between socioeconomic status and Facebook use.

“To paraphrase [the science fiction writer] William Gibson, the future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed,” he said.

“It’s striking that factors associated with lower socioeconomic status, such as low income, are also associated with a decreased probability of having a Facebook account.

“Others have written about this point, but it’s important to remember that, even when services such as Facebook are monetarily free, there are still socioeconomic differences in who has access.”