Loneliness in relation to social networking site usage among university students

Pages: 518-521
Komal Rai and Gurpreet Gill (Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar, Panjab)

Human beings always need someone, with whom they can talk and share their problems and feelings. And when there is a lack of communication between family and friends, the individual start feeling lonely. But now through internet based networking sites facility, people are more able to connect to one another than ever before in the history .But still despite of having the facilities to connect with others easily,18-to 35-year-olds are more likely to feel lonely often or feel depressed because of loneliness than people aged over 50. Late teens to early 30s have reported feeling loner that those in old age. Despite of having the positive side of social networking sites, there is a danger of replacing real-life relationships with superficial, online communication. It is a great concern because loneliness leads to depression and other psychological problems. Now in India we have more cases of depression, suicide ideation, negative thoughts etc in youths as compared to previous times. This research aim was to find out relation between social networking site usage and loneliness and also the role of gender in social networking sites usage and in loneliness. To assess loneliness, UCLA Loneliness Scale was used and for social networking sites usage, Facebook intensity scale was applied, because youngsters are using more facebook than other social sites. Sample was comprised of total 160 undergraduate’s students (80 males and 80 females with age range of 18 to 25) from Lovely Professional University. Taking in consideration our objectives and hypotheses, data collection was analyzed by Independent sample t-test and Pearson’s product moment correlation. The result revealed that there was a positive significant relationship between loneliness and social networking sites. The correlation value between loneliness and social networking sites was 0.247**. Through t-test we found that in loneliness (t (160) = 2.247*, p < 0.05) males were more lonely (X = 45.21) than the female (X = 41.93). In social networking sites (t (160) = 5.009**, p < 0.01), males (X = 26.86) were using more social networking site i.e. Facebook than the females (X = 21.86).