Impact of Social Networking Sites Among College Students With Special Reference to Rural Areas in India

Abstract

Social networking sites over the years have changed from a few user-based sites into a phenomena that has become a platform for a huge number of users. However, the growth and development of social networking sites have brought great concerns on parents and educational authorities with respect to potential risks that are facing the university students as they use online social networking frequently for gathering information. The use of social networking sites among the university students requires much attention with increasing number of students creating profile and feeding their personal information into the sites. The increasing activity on the sites by student community can negatively impact the normal activity of students' lives. This can also become a hindrance to the academic development as well as social engagement of students. Therefore, there is a need to study, assess, and evaluate the issues revolving the usage of social networking sites among the student community. The study shows that the distribution of respondents according to their influence of SNS. It shows both section-wise distribution and their composite scores. Also, the table shows the respective mean scores and standard deviation. It may be inferred that 77.50% of the respondents have stated that the influence of SNS are high, 18.55% of the respondents have stated that the influence of SNS is moderate, and 3.95% of the respondents have stated that the influence of SNS is low. However, the composite mean score (2.72), standard deviation (0.530) depicts that the respondents have stated that the influence of SNS is high.