Students concerned their relationships are on the rocks and could end soon can gain some insight from a study of Facebook statuses.
A new graphic circulating on the Internet charts the use of the phrases “breakup” and “broken up” in Facebook status updates to show what time of the year couples split.
David McCandless, a London-based writer and designer who focuses on data journalism and information design, along with colleague Lee Bryon, created the data visualization in 2008 by scraping 10,000 Facebook status updates for data.
McCandless exhibited the graphic during a July TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference on data visualization.
He described the graph to the audience, saying, “People clearing out for Spring Break, coming out of very bad weekends on Monday, being single over the summer. And then the lowest day of the year, of course: Christmas Day. Who would do that?”
The graphic shows spikes in breakups after Valentine’s Day and in the two weeks before Christmas.
There was also a significant spike on April Fool’s Day.
Jessica Semin, a freshman pre-nursing student at U. Nebraska-Lincoln, said she thinks people may break up more frequently in the weeks before Christmas because of winter break for college students.
“Maybe since people are with their friends, and not together,” she said.
“During Christmas in college, students go back home and see old friends.”
Jesse Barlean, a sophomore at UNL, had a different theory.
“I was actually just talking about this with my friends,” he said.
“We thought people break up over Christmas and stay broken up until Valentine’s Day because they don’t want to buy gifts.”
He thought Spring Break breakups were also explainable.
“No one wants a girlfriend for Spring Break,” he said.
Semin said that the Monday breakup spikes seemed likely to her.
“Mondays are never a good day for anyone. And it’s coming off a weekend,” she said, adding that sometimes couples have fights over weekend events.
Barlean agreed, saying, “People have bad Mondays.”
As for April Fool’s Day, Barlean doubts that more couples actually split up on that day.
“On April Fool’s Day, maybe it’s just a joke,” he said.
During his TED talk, McCandless uses his visualization as an example of the wealth of data available to researchers on the Internet.
“There’s a titanic amount of data out there,” he said. “It’s unprecedented.”