Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 51, Part B, October 2015, Pages 1092-1097
Computers in Human Behavior

Impact of social media usage on students academic performance in Saudi Arabia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.09.028Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The quantitative study to explore the most popular amongst Saudi students.

  • The study establishes relation among the social media usage and academic grades.

  • Poor time management and football also have negative impact on academic grades.

  • Normality tests are to find relationship among social media usage and GPA scores.

  • The hypothesis about existence of relationship among GPA and SN is not satisfied.

Abstract

Social media is a popular method for communication amongst university students in Saudi Arabia. However excessive social media use can raise questions about whether academic performance is affected. This research explores this question by conducting a survey on university students in Saudi Arabia in regards to social media usage and their academic performance. The survey also explored which social network is the most popular amongst Saudi students, what students thought about their social media usage and factors besides social media usage which negatively affect academic performance.

The survey received 108 responses and descriptive statistics including normality tests i.e. scatter plots were used to examine the relationship between the average number of hours students spent of social media a week and GPA scores of the students. The results demonstrated that there was no linear relationship between social media usage in a week and GPA score. Students highlighted that besides social media use, time management is a factor which affects students ‘studies negatively.

The findings of the paper can be used to propose the effective plans for improving the academic performance of the students in such a way that a balance in the leisure, information exchange and academic performance can be maintained.

Introduction

The use of social media plays a variety of roles in education as highlighted by Al-Khalifa and Garcia (2013), which include providing a media to share ideas as well as allowing students to build their own communities to collaborate with each other, facilitating the art of learning and reaching out to the students in order to understand and teach them at the same time. Studies such as Junco et al., 2011, Tariq et al., 2012, Sampson et al., 2004, García-Peñalvo et al., 2012, Camilia et al., 2013 have explored the effects of social media use on students’ academic performance, ability to engage and the effect on their lives, in countries such as USA, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Junco et al. (2011) research explored the impact of Twitter usage for educational purposes on college student engagement and learning in the USA. Results indicated that Twitter can engage students by being used as an educational tool and to facilitate a more active role, in which teaching staff can participate. Tariq et al. (2012) focused on the impact of social media, on the education of Pakistani students as well as the impact on their lives. The research concluded that the use of social media by teenagers and children could ruin their lives as well as have a bad impact on their education. Social media diverts the attention and concentration of students towards activities which are not educational and time wasting such as chatting on non educational topics.

Camilia et al. (2013) looked into the role of social media in Nigerian students’ studies by distributing a survey. The study found that the frequent use of social media by students had no effect on their studies. In contrast to Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010, WiredSaftey, 2009, Tariq et al., 2012, concentrated on university students in Saudi Arabia. The aim is to explore the relationship between the use of social media by Saudi Arabia university students and their academic performance. Our research study involves distributing an online survey to students to ascertain information on their social media usage and GPA scores. Also their views on the effect of social media on their academic performance are collected. Al-Mudimigh, Ullah, and Shahzad (2010) demonstrated that how the university portals are developed, the examples are (Al-Ohali et al. 2011, Shahzad and Alwagait, 2013, Alwagait and Shahzad, 2014).

A previous study by Ketari and Khanum (2013) explored the relationship between social media usage and academic performance in Saudi Arabia, through the distribution of a self-administered survey. The study focused on Facebook as the social media platform and utilised the survey to ascertain from the participants, their thoughts on the effect of Facebook use on their academic performance.

Our research is differs from Curtis (2011), i.e. the survey covers a variety of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The evaluation of the outcome of the study, are based on several parameters: the recommended number of hours to be used on the social media based on the information retrieved from the students, the percent change in social media connectivity between 2012 and 2014, the most popular social media platform among the Saudi students as well as the relationship between academic performance and social connectivity.

The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 explores the foundations of social media through Web 2.0 as well as the risks that social media brings. Section 3 describes our methodology regarding the online survey. Section 4 discusses the findings and Section 5 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Related work

Social media is defined by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) as “internet based applications that allow the creation and exchange of content which is user generated”. Social media allows users as well as communities to create, collaborate and edit user content. Key features of Web 2.0 included providing a rich user experience, where users interact with the data which is dynamically created from users’ input, users act as contributors to a site through reviews as well as comments and allowing users to

Methodology

Our research methodology focuses on several areas. We asked students about their opinions on other factors which affect their academic performance and how many hours should be spent on social media per week in order for their not to be a negative academic performance. This study follows a quantitative methodology for the collection of data from university students in Saudi Arabia.

The aim of the survey is to address the following research questions

  • R1 – Which social network is the most popular

Results

The data was retrieved from 108 students over a period of three months. The students’ responses are evaluated against the following parameters.

  • a.

    Which social network is the most popular among Saudi students?

Fig. 1(a) demonstrates the number of respondents’ profiles on different social networks. Twitter is the most popular followed by the Facebook then Instagram and other social networks e.g. LinkedIn, path and ask.fm. Out of the 108 respondents, 90% of respondents have Twitter profiles while 44%

Conclusions

It can be concluded that the hypothesis “The increase in use of social networks decreases the academic performance of the students” is not satisfied by the findings of this study. Examining the variables social media and GPA scores separately, it was found that social media usage on a weekly basis displayed a positive skew where most students do not use social media excessively. There are a few exceptional cases where students showed excessive use of social media. On the other hand, average GPA

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by the Research Centre of College of Computer and Information Sciences in King Saud University. The authors are grateful for this support.

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