Student Perceptions of Employer Use of Social Media in Selection Decisions: Comparing Criminal Justice Majors to Non-Majors

Abstract

An increasing concern among university professors and students alike is the image that students project through their social media accounts, particularly when future graduates seek employment in fields such as policing and other criminal justice careers. Despite this common concern, little research has examined the degree to which criminal justice (CJ) students accept employer use of social media searches as a screening tool, or whether there is variation among students based upon characteristics commonly associated with employment discrimination. Drawing upon a survey of over 630 students in criminal justice courses at five public universities, the current inquiry finds that criminal justice majors’ opinions of social media searches do not differ from non-majors taking criminal justice courses. However, African-American, Latino, and students of other races all have less acceptance of the use of employer searches of social media than do white students. Implications for policy and future research are also discussed.

Keywords:

• Background checks
• degree major
• employer screening
• social media

Notes on contributors

Dr. Michael T. Rossler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University.

Dr. Rossler completed his Ph.D. in from the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. His primary research interests involve police-citizen encounters, police responsiveness, police recruitment and training, and occupational attitudes within police departments.

Dr. Charles Scheer is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at The University of Southern Mississippi. His research focuses on police workforce management, training, and police legitimacy. He has publications on police recruitment and retention strategies, civil liability, and a national assessment of potential police recruit attitudes towards police careers. He has also directed a research project on first-line supervisor leadership training programs from a national sample. His research has been published in Police Quarterly, Policing: An International Journal, Sheriff & Deputy, Justice Research and Policy, and Law Enforcement Executive Forum. He has spoken at many peer-reviewed academic and professional conferences such as the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) annual conference, the National Sheriff's Association conference, and the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice conference. He also remains a part-time sheriff's deputy in Mississippi.

Notes

1 In some states, the right not to disclose a computer password upon demand is protected by law; in some of these locations, police agencies have skirted this law by asking the applicant to sign into their social media account from a laptop provided for them, which is then given to the background investigator.

2 Students who completed the survey during the pre-test phase were not included in the sample.

3 Determining acceptable alpha values by heuristic means (e.g., all values above .70 are acceptable, while all those below are not) can be somewhat problematic (see Taber, 2018) due to features of scales that can influence alpha values (e.g., the number of items included). The acceptance scale was designed to include indicators capturing the full complement of issues deemed important by prior research (Chan & Schmitt, 2004). Based upon the Chronbach’s alpha value, we have confidence that none of the indicators included is producing values that are internally inconsistent with the other indicators. Additionally, the use of scales with four items or fewer is also consistent with prior research on criminal justice education (Cooper, Updegrove & Bouffard, 2019; Paoline, Terrill & Rossler, 2015).

4 Students who indicated they were double majoring, with at least one of those majors being criminal justice, were coded as “1”.

5 Collinearity diagnostics were completed for the reported OLS regression model. The highest variance inflation factor (VIF) indicated was 1.947. This value signals a lower concern for collinearity (Chatterjee and Price, 1991).

6 The potential reasons for enrollment of non-criminal justice majors in the five sites surveyed varied across each site, and included the status of many criminal justice courses as minor courses, the fact that certain courses such as Ethics are taught to diverse majors, and the fact that criminal justice courses may act as electives.