Internet browsing behavior: a case study of executive postgraduate students in Ghana

Abstract

This paper examines the motivation for Internet browsing amongst Executive MBA (EMBA) students at the University of Ghana Business School. It underscores the importance of the environmental influences on the social, academic and professional use of the Internet by executive masters students in Ghana. This paper is executed via a qualitative research design. Data for the study was gathered through structured focus group interviews with 24 Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) students of the University of Ghana Business School. The study revealed that students browse the Internet for social, academic and professional purposes. The social use of the Internet includes sending and receiving email, socializing through Facebook, chatting, and making new friends. Professionally, students browse the Internet to obtain trade information, interact with clients, check on conference alerts, and access databases of clients. The academic motivations for browsing the Internet include research, getting access to academic journal databases, interacting with lecturers and supervisors, registering for professional courses and obtaining information on specific courses of study.

Discovering the Motives to Browse Internet among MBA Students: An Interpretivist Investigation

“…The core motivation to use Internet is the social purpose, that is, connecting with friends through social media. These critical findings support the work performed by Hinson (2011)—a study conducted in Ghana among executive MBA students. The students also benefit from Internet use to enhance their academic performance, as per the findings of this study.…”

“…The students generally browse Internet once they perceive it as (a) being useful (Selim, 2003) and (b) facilitating their activities to perform work-related tasks (Fusilier & Durlabhji, 2005). The students use Internet for social, academic and professional usage (Hinson, 2011).…”

“…There are lots of research studies already published which encapsulate technology acceptance behaviour in general. However, few studies are available which encapsulate Internet browsing behaviour among students—we browsed the Google Scholar with various keywords and found only few studies where Internet browsing among business school community is investigated (Hinson, 2011). Another motivation to conduct this study is the dominant positivist perspective employed by technology adoption researchers to study the individual behaviour by the conduct of excellent quantitative studies—generally faced with self-reported biases and also lacking in the depth and richness which is always needed to study human behaviour (Fusilier & Durlabhji, 2005).…”

“…There has been efforts to facilitate student learning by a combination of technologies to foster academic learning—ultimately to contribute positively towards social and organization development (Figlio, Rush, & Yin, 2010). Since the challenges to students are different in different cultures (Kashif & Basharat, 2014), there has been a trend to conduct country-specific studies (Egberongbe, 2011; Hinson, 2011) to meet these challenges. Keeping abreast with this tradition of contextualization to build theory (Flower, 1989), this study is grounded in unique and challenging country context, that is, Pakistan.…”

Influence of network density on information diffusion on social network sites

“…According to previous studies, connections on SNS can be divided into two-way connections (friends) and one-way connections (fans and followers) (Liang, Ho, Li et al, 2011). These connections do not require considerable effort, and connected people do not need to know each other in the real world (Hinson, 2011;Kim and Lee, 2011). Therefore, SNS influence the way people socialize and disseminate information, and have transformed interactions between consumers and companies (Haythornthwaite, 2002;Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzalez et al, 2008;Zhao et al, 2008).…”