Offline versus Virtual Socialization Patterns and Smartphone: A Study of Pakistani Youth

Abstract

The current study contributes by researching the associations of levels of offline socialization patterns with the virtual socialization ones. The controlled effects of time for Smartphone usage and gender are also explained. The study utilizes the convenience sampling technique and selects the students (N=215) from the two educational institutes of Lahore. By using quantitative approach of cross-sectional survey the data is collected through offline survey with the help of a questionnaire. Descriptive statistics reveal that the students are gratifying smart phone to virtually socialize with their friends, class fellows and teachers. The medium levels of correlations are found for the offline and virtual socialization patterns for seeking news and interaction with the class fellows. The significant controlled effects are visible for the time for Smartphone usage and the gender. The triangulation of theories enriches the analysis. The teachers should use Whats'App effectively for teaching purposes.

Cyber Socialization Engagement and Dark Tetrad of Personality among Young University Students

“…However, two fundamental difficulties stand in the way of such a study. The first of them is theoretical, related to the debatability of the central construct used to describe this phenomenon: along with the concept of cyber socialization (see Lenkov andRubtsova, 2019, 2022;Lenkov, Rubtsova and Efremova, 2019), many other competing concepts are used here, such as digital socialization (e.g., Kim, 2015), virtual socialization (Saeed and Hassan, 2020), Internet socialization (Honnekeri et al, 2017), media socialization (Milenkova, Peicheva and Marinov, 2018), and others. The second difficulty is methodical, associated with measuring tools for determining the severity of certain processes of cyber socialization, their representation in the life of a particular person, i.e., what we call the cyber socialization engagement.…”

“…-either taking into account only certain, rather narrow aspects of the cyber socialization engagement, such as motivation or the nature of the use of the Internet (e.g., Smith, Hewitt and Skrbiš, 2015), smartphones (Servidio, Griffiths and Demetrovics, 2021), social networks (Casale, Musicò and Spada, 2021;Kircaburun, Jonason and Griffiths, 2018) and instant messengers (Casale, Musicò and Spada, 2021;Honnekeri et al, 2017;Saeed and Hassan, 2020), such specific negative manifestations of destructive cyber socialization as cyberbullying and cyberstalking (Kircaburun, Jonason and Griffiths, 2018), cybervictimization (Shoib et al, 2022), various cyberaddictions (see, for example, (Casale, Musicò and Spada, 2021;Siah et al, 2021), cyberloafing (Metin-Orta and Demirtepe-Saygılı, 2021), etc.…”