IMPACT OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES ON HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS IN SARGODHA, PAKISTAN

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the impact of social networking sites, specifically Facebook and their influence on the students of higher institutions in Sargodha, Pakistan. Different factors like ‘Enjoyment’, Ease of use and Usefulness were adopted to examine the impact of SNSs on the life of college and university going students by the usage of Facebook. The research was conducted on the basis of descriptive and quantitative data research with the help of a self-reported structured questionnaire on 256 students who were randomly selected from different colleges and universities of Sargodha, Pakistan as the targeted population. It was observed that the majority of the students were familiar with the scope and usage of social networking sites like Instagram, Skype, Twitter and specifically Facebook which was frequently used than other applications.  There is a slight variation in the values of mean, median and standard deviation respectively that were used for different demographic variables like age, gender, duration, usage, application, hours and qualification in the frequency distribution model. The correlation between different independent variables like Perceived usefulness, Ease of use, Perceived Enjoyment, Actual use and dependent variable ‘Intention to use’ were examined that turned out to be significant at 0.01 level. The regression analysis also disclosed that the first independent variable “Perceived usefulness” is not positively related to dependent variable “Intention to use” while the other two independent variables “Ease of use” and “Perceived Enjoyment” are positively related to the dependent variable “Intention to use”. For future research larger samples would be more suitable for usage and analysis.