SOCIAL MEDIA AND SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT OF SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN UYO LOCAL EDUCATION COMMITTEE
ABSTRACT
The study investigated “Social Media and Social Adjustment of Senior Secondary School Students in Uyo Local Education Committee”. Descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of this study consisted of 5422 SS2 students. A sample of 357 was used for the study. However, 200 students successfully returned their questionnaire which was used for analysis. A researcher-made instrument titled “Social Media and Social Adjustment of Senior Secondary School Students Questionnaire” (SMSASSSSQ) was used to collect data for the study. The SMSASSSSQ instrument was structured in a 4-point rating scale with the response options of Strongly Agree (SA) 4 points, Agree (A) 3 points, Disagree (D) 2 points and Strongly Disagree (SD) 1 points. The research instrument was face validated by three research experts from the Department of Educational Foundations, Guidance and Counselling, Faculty of Education, University of Uyo, Uyo. The reliability of the research instrument SMSASSSSQ was tried-out on randomly selected 30 secondary school students who were not part of the main study. Cronbach alpha reliability formula was used to determine the internal consistency of the instrument which stood at 0.67 for facebook, 0.70 for whatsapp, 0.62 for twitter, 0.56 snap chat and 0.70 for social adjustment. The average of these reliability indices was 0.65. The research assistants administered and collected the completed copies within a space of one week. Out of 357 copies of the questionnaire administered on the respondents, 200 copies representing 56% were appropriately filled and returned to the researcher and were used for analyses. 92 copies representing 26% were inappropriately filled and 65 copies representing 18% were not returned.The research questions were answered using mean statistics, while the null hypotheses (1-4) were tested with dependent t-test at 0.05 level of significance using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25. Based on the findings of this study, it was concluded that there is a significant influence of Social Media variables such as facebook, whatsapp, twitter and snap chat on Social Adjustment of Senior Secondary School Students in Uyo Local Education Committee. In the light of the findings and conclusion drawn in this study, it was recommended among others that students should use facebook positively to promote social adjustment and self-development.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
Adjustment refers to an individual general adaptation to his environment and the demands of life such as the way he relates to other people that is, interpersonal behaviour, handle his responsibilities, deal with stress and meet with his own need and life satisfaction. The society is dynamic and change is the only constant thing, so the individual’s ability to review his attitude and behaviour is an essential ingredient in adjustment. According to Shumnger and Oneail (2014), adjustment has been analysed as an achievement as well as process in psychology.
Social adjustment is an effort by an individual to cope with standards, values and nee`ds of the society in order to be acceptable. It involves coping with new standards and values. Social adjustment includes how the person interacts with others and how the person conforms to social expectations (Davidson and Jackson, 2000). In technical application, social adjustment means getting along with members of the society as best as one can. In this regard, social adjustment means reaction to the demands and pressure of the social environment. One of the important elements of social adjustment and social integration is the social media.
In the current society, especially for the young generation, social media has become a part of everyday life. People have access to all types of information across the globe in the palm of hands using social media. Social media, such as facebook, twitter, yahoo, telegram, IMO, skype, messenger, whatsapp, snap chat, YouTube, 2go, palm chat, Tango, Skype, Google plus, Fickr, WeChat, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Instagram, MySpace, Badoo, Digg, JISC, Blogs, and other chat sites have taken the technology world to a new level. The dramatic evolution of technology, especially new social media, has greatly influenced every facet of human society; the way people use time and space, and the perception of media (Chen, 2012). People are now logging on social media on mobile devices everywhere, at any time making it a common everyday activity and this can be confirmed which estimates that about 1.925 billion users of smart phones make use of their devices for social media in the world (Star, 2011).
More and more scholars have started recently to examine the influence of social media on human life (Piotrowski, 2012). Over the past decade, social media usage have increased substantially in popularity and become part of social practices (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Social media positively contribute to increased people’s capacity for making and sustaining friendships as well as facilitating regular communication (Marshall, Bejanyan, Di Castro, and Lee, 2012). Due to the growth in social media usage, there is adverse effects and addictive behaviours among many users (Cao, Sun, Wan, Hao and Tao, 2011)).
Kuss and Griffiths (2011) observe that adolescents are at vulnerable period to various social media influences such as, cognitive, emotional, and physical. Currently excessive use of social media resulted in negative impact on maintaining daily routines, school performance, social and psychological wellbeing (Choi, 2007; Sirgy, 2006 and Rickert, 2001). Furthermore, Kalpidou, Costin and Morris, (2011); Niemz (2005), suggested that frequently using social media was related to lower self-esteem, and were more socially disinherited than non-users.
Technology, like two sides of a coin, brings both negative and positive effects. Social media has transformed the way information is received and sent and has greatly bridged the geographical gap that exist between people. The world has been changed rapidly by the evolution of technology; this has resulted in the use of technology as the best medium to explore the wide area of knowledge. The evolution of internet technology has led its use as the best medium for communication. In the present world, social media usage is becoming a critical issue especially for its effect on the psycho-social adjustment of adolescents (Kalpidou, Costin and Morris, 2011).) For instance, people who use social media excessively showed significantly more symptoms of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and loneliness than those who are not users (Morrison & Gore, 2010).
Similarly, Andreassen (2015) investigated that those individuals who are highly concerned about social media, strongly motivated to use social media and who devoted excessive amount of time to use social media negatively affected in their psychological well-being, health well-being, social and academic activities. It is assumed that improper use of social media has a negative effect on the societal norms and values of adolescent students.
Social media has become a global phenomenon and a very important means of communication among peers, families and all manner of persons in the world. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin and Instant Messaging Services (IMS) such as Whatsapp, Snap chat and IMO and video calling services like Skype have become a popular means of communication in the past few years. Boyd and Ellison (2007:2) define social media as “a public web-based service that permits users to create a personal profile, identify other users with whom they can relate to or have a connection with, read and react to posts made by other users on the site, and send and receive messages either privately or publicly”.
Kuss and Griffiths (2011:9) also define social media as “virtual communities where users can create individual public profiles, interact with real-life friends, and meet other people based on shared interests”. Any website that enables social interaction by users is considered a social media site. Such sites are an online technology with the ability to allow users to interact and share information online (Bastani and Zarandi, 2009).
Facebook is one of the most populous social media used by people. This media site is a popular online social media and is the most visited website in the United States (Orelind, 2009). Since many people join this online social networking site, it is said that “if facebook were a country, it would be the fifth most populated in the world, ahead of Japan and Russia” (Zuckerberg, 2009). Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (2004) were the founders of facebook (Bastani and Zarandi, 2009).
Whatsapp is a mobile messaging application which allows the users to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. Whatsapp started in the year 2009, by J. Koum to make communication and the distribution of multimedia messaging more easily and faster (Boyd and Ellison (2007).
Twitter is one of those Web 2.0 technologies and it belongs in the general category of microblogging, which allows users to share posts by using a limited number of characters 140 and recently, 280. An important characteristic of Twitter is the so called “hashtag”. Hashtags are represented by the symbol of ‘#’ and they are words or phrases without spaces. Users are able to follow a theme through hashtag where they could comment, share photos and videos etc.
Twitter is a useful tool in real-time communication and the participation in it is influenced by peers (Costa, Bcham, Reinhardt and Sillaots, 2008). Twitter improves active learning and provides incentives to the students (Gao, Luo and Zhang, 2012). Students seem to gain confidence, reflection and collaborative learning and they improve their sociability (Chen and Chen, 2012; Smith and Tirumala, 2012).
Snapchat is a multimedia messaging app used globally, created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown former students at Stanford University, and developed by Snap Incorporation (Gillette, 2014). One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before they become inaccessible to their recipients. The app has evolved from originally focusing on person-to-person photo sharing to presently featuring users’ “Stories” of 24 hours of chronological content, along with “Discover”, letting brands show ad-supported short-form content. Snapchat has become notable for representing a new, mobile-first direction for social media, and places significant emphasis on users interacting with virtual stickers and augmented reality objects. As of February 2018, Snapchat has 187 million daily active users. According to these founders, with the help of snap chat application, an individual can chat with family, friends beyond the limit of seas and keep contact to everybody at one time. According to Flad (2010), Snap chat gives one an opportunity to not only showcase the true culture of your school but build an even stronger culture by engaging with your students outside of the classroom. With storytelling, behind the scenes, candid moments, contests and more, snap chat is a great way to talk to students in “their language. Everyone likes to feel like they are part of something special and selective. Students who have added your school on Snap chat can receive exclusive sneak peeks behind the scenes of school events and happenings”.
Psychologists have been interested to examine adjustment as a process. This entails examining of students behaviours with the external world. Therefore, the present study focused on examining the influence of social media on social adjustment of secondary school students in Uyo Local Education Committee.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT OF SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN UYO LOCAL EDUCATION COMMITTEE
