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Social Media Usage Amongst University of Botswana First Year Undergraduate Students

Published: 26 January 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Despite extensive literature about social media usage among tertiary students, little is reported about Botswana's context. This study therefore seeks to investigate the extent of social media adoption among University of Botswana (UB) first year students. The study adapted a questionnaire that has been developed and tested for the measurement of social media usage in India. Students who registered for Information and Computing Skills Fundamentals II (ICT122) in five faculties in UB during the academic year 2021/22 participated in the study. The findings show that WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were the most commonly used applications. Social media was mostly used for entertainment purposes followed by academic use. Additionally, there were no statistically significant differences in terms of dimensions of social media use of first year undergraduate students across the various faculties and students background in relation to location and type of secondary education. Furthermore, in general students faced some constraints with social media use, although overall it was moderate.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ACIT '22: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Applied Computing & Information Technology
    May 2022
    81 pages
    ISBN:9781450397605
    DOI:10.1145/3543895
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 26 January 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. Social media usage
    2. first year undergraduate students
    3. usage factors

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