Excessive Social Media Usage among Federal University Students in Southern Nigeria

Abstract

The study was carried out to investigate the excessive social media usage among Federal university students in Southern Nigeria. Three research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population comprised of 25607 university students (in first and second year) in eight federal universities in Southern Nigeria and sample size comprised of 2688 students covering 10.5 percent of the population were selected through proportionate stratified random sampling. The instrument for data collection is the Social Media Disorder (SMD) scale. It is a standardized instrument developed by Eijnden, Lemmen and Valkenburg (2016). The researchers adopted it for very minor modification. Aggregate scores and arithmetic mean were used to answer the research questions while the null hypotheses were tested using t-test 0.05 level of significance. The findings showed that most of the university students make worrisome excessive use of social media and the students do not differ significantly in their usage of social media due to their gender and year of study. Based on the findings, the study therefore recommended that The University guidance counsellors should start without delay to apply some therapeutic and behaviour modification techniques to assist the students who have become addicted to social media. Also academic counsellors and other university lecturers should start making use of e-portfolio in the teaching and giving students assignments so that the social media could useful to the students who are already addicted to it.