Behavioral Attributes and Risk Factors on Usage of Social Networking Sites Among School Going Children of Chennai - A Cross Sectional Study

Social networking addiction is a phrase used to refer to someone spending too much time using Face book, Twitter and other forms of social media so much so that it interferes with other aspects of daily life. Although many studies were done on internet addiction, no large scale studies were done on social network site addiction among teenagers. Materials and methods: This study was done as a cross sectional study during Feb 2013 to May 2013 with the objectives of assessing the usage pattern of social network sites, addictive behavior towards its usage and its effects among school going teenagers from different randomly selected schools in Chennai. The school authorities were approached and after getting the consent from them, a day was fixed for data collection using the preformed predetermined questionnaire by face to face interview method, after getting informed consent. The data was entered in MS excel sheet and analysis was done using Epi Info software version 3.5, 2008. Results: Totally 613 were studied; of which majority 61% of them were males, mean age of the study population was 15.27. 85% belonged to nuclear family and 37% of them belonged to class I socioeconomic status. Among the total study participants 76.6% (470) use social network sites regularly with the mean of 1.46 hours per day. The favorite social networking site was facebook, followed by youtube, twitter, google pus, what’s app and yahoo messenger. Addictive behavior was present among 242 (39.5%) of the teenagers which was significantly associated with male gender (p=0.00001), nuclear family (p=0.01), every day visits to these sites (p=0.0001), hours spent per day (p=0.0001), more friends in Social networking than in real life (p=0.0001) and playing games (p=0.026). Conclusion: This study had explored that majority of the teenagers were addicted to social networking sites and hence steps should be taken to create awareness to the teenagers and their patents regarding the addictive behaviors and risk factors associated with the usage of social networking sites.

Author(s): Balaji Arumugam, Saranya Nagalingam and Roshni Ganesan

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