Prevalence of Social Media Networking on Academic Achievement and Psychological Health of Undergraduate Students in Federal Universities in Nigeria

Abstract

Social Media are mediae that allow users to meet online through the internet to communicate in social forum. To investigate the prevalence of social media networking, as it relates to academic achievement and psychological health of undergraduate students in federal universities in Nigeria, the study adopted a correlational survey research design. The study was carried out in federal universities in Nigeria. The population comprised all 28,120 undergraduates in the faculties of Education and Engineering in the 40 federal universities in Nigeria in 2015/2016 academic session. Simple and stratified random sampling techniques were used to draw a sample of 351 undergraduate students in 200 level in faculties of education and engineering in 4 sampled federal universities from 40 federal universities in Nigeria used for the study. Six research questions and four null hypotheses formulated guided the study. Strong reliability evidence was found for social media networking and psychological health scales which yielded 0.78 and 0.74 respectively. The instrument for data collection were well-structured interview schedule, self report questionnaire and students raw scores on a four point likert-type format which were administered to elicit information on students’ social media networking, whilst an achievement test was administered to ascertain their academic achievement. Data for research questions 1 and 2 were answered using mean and standard deviation, whilst data for research questions 3-6 were analyzed using pearson’s r and R-square. The hypotheses were tested using Analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistic at 0.05 level of significance. It was found that students’ social media networking significantly predicts their academic achievement and psychological health. Based on the findings, of this study, the researchers recommended among others that, the parents, peers and teachers should be on guard to ensure that these students use social networking for appropriate period or not and as well help these students to be aware of the negative effects.

Keywords:Mental health social media, Academic Achievement and Networking