Social Networking Usage Questionnaire: Development and Validation in an Indian Higher Education Context

Abstract

The concept of social networking has received much attention from academia over the last decade in India. Widespread research has conceptualized the term social networking with almost all of the studies either conceptual or based on case studies. This paper is an attempt to clarify the construct of social networking by developing a reliable and valid questionnaire measuring social networking usage. 420 university students from 6 universities in Jammu and Kashmir were surveyed via a random sampling technique and factor analysis carried out on their responses. The findings revealed that social networking usage can be decomposed into four factors: academic; socialization; entertainment and informativeness. The internal consistency indices, Cronbach's alpha of social networking usage (α= .830) indicates good internal reliability. The findings revealed that the newly developed questionnaire has significant psychometric features.Keywords: Social networking usage, university students, scale development, factor analysis. INTRODUCTIONSocial networking usage refers to online space that is used by students to connect, share, communicate, establish or maintain connection with others for academic, entertainment, socialization etc. Social networking as a communication medium is rising quickly, mostly in the prosperous increase of applications for mobile devices. Especially young adults are becoming familiar with sharing their everyday life and experiences, keeping in touch with teachers, friends, and family online and talking about their interests (Leung 2002; Morahan-Martin & Schumacher 2003). The past few years have observed an explosion of social networking such as Twitter, Facebook etc. which have added a fresh social dimension to the web. There have been a rapidly increasing number of online connections among groups of persons who share similar interests, though they are assembled in an absolute space (Wilson et.al 2002). A number of social networking sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google plus, Orkut, Google plus) have employed dynamic social contexts in which online communities can be made and continued easily by the facilitation of communications and social connections among users. Such networking opportunities help make groups, communities and people with shared interests remain more associated. In recent years, social networking sites have been the prevalent tools for online communication combining the interpersonal and mass communication competences 215 together (Pempek, et al; 2009; Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook support online groups that allow users to broadcast and construct their profile information, and interact with others by sending personal and public messages, playing games, and sharing photos (Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert, 2009; Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Social networking sites facilitate individuals, making new online friends and acquaintances, and to maintain pre-existing social connections (Ellison, Lampe, & Steinfield, 2007). The majority o...

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The Effect of Individual’s Technological Belief and Usage on Their Absorptive Capacity towards Their Learning Behaviour in Learning Environment

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