Use of Facebook and its impact on the university students in Dhaka: an exploratory analysis

Abstract

With the recent technological revolution internet and social networking sites have come to the fingertips of to the world citizens. which is the most widely used social network, which has been used for recreational, leisure and communication purposes with the surrounding people of the world. This study examines the usage pattern, advantage, disadvantage, and addiction of Facebook among the students of Master of Development Studies (MDS) of BRAC University. This study gives an overview of the use of Facebook, for what benefits they use it, what kind of problems they face while using Facebook. A structured questionnaire was used to collect information from 79 respondents. The most frequent users of Facebook users age ranges from 18 to 24 years old thus target people for this research has been fixed from 18 to 28 years old University students in Dhaka. Target group (18-28 years old university students) responses were 55 people. Findings of this study reveal that the duration of usage per day of the respondents is 167.4 minutes. The average logins per day was found 9.35 times. They spent on an average 27 minutes on Facebook per session of logins. Most observed Facebook advantages are: networking, news source, information and educational help, whereas disadvantages are: wasting of time, health issues, reduced family time, bothered by fake profiles. It was found that 40% of the respondents are severely addicted to Facebook whereas 27% of them are moderately addicted. After running a Pearson correlation test it was found that there is a significant positive correlation between the higher duration in Facebook with higher levels of addiction.