Effect of Social Media Usage on Research Competences and Completion during COVID-19: Case of Pre-Service Health Sciences Researchers

Abstract

Introduction: Pandemic has proved to be a game-changer for higher education. The emerging context of using different social media tools for timely completion of their graduate and postgraduate research is evident among health sciences pre-service researchers during the pandemic. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with health sciences preservice researchers (n=410) enrolled in postgraduate health sciences programs of the Pakistani universities. The Vitae (2011) framework was considered to measure research competences of the pre-service researchers with the factors of personal effectiveness (PE), research knowledge and intellectual abilities (KI), research and governance (RG), and researcher's engagement and influence (EI) to disseminate research. Conclusions explicitly focused on using Social Media are drawn from the Structure Equation Model obtained via Smart PLS.Results: The findings have highlighted that preservice health sciences researchers used different forms of social media to support their research completion during COVID-19. Multimedia tools helped pre-service researchers to share information through audio, video, and image sharing service on various networks. Information management tools such as google docs and monkey surveys were useful for data collection during COVID-19.Conclusion: This study implicated that different forms of social media tools helped health sciences pre-service researchers develop their research competences, such as personal effectiveness, research governance, and research engagement, which ultimately influenced them to complete their research tasks on time in pandemics.