A Study on Determinants of Happiness among University Girl Students Using Social Media

Abstract

Background: There are several substances where human beings get addicted to and social media could be one of them. Although social media is a tool of productivity, it also encourages unproductive activities such as procrastination that affects the mental health of the individual. Objectives: To assess the level of social media addiction, procrastination, happiness and its correlates with the background characteristics of the postgraduate girl students staying in the university hostel; and to identify the major predictors of the subjective happiness of the respondents. Materials and Method: There were 905 postgraduate girl students staying at Bharathidasan University girls’ hostel. Of these, 277 were selected as sample using a simple random sampling technique. The data were collected using the Social Media Addiction Scale developed by the researcher, the Procrastination Scale developed by Lay (1986) and the Happiness Scale developed by Lyubomirsky and Lepper (1999). The reliability values for the scales were Alpha 0.868, 0.733 and 0.731 respectively.  Result: The findings indicate that nearly two-thirds of the respondents scored a high level of procrastination (65.7%), social media addiction (64.6%) and just over half (51.6%) of the respondents have scored a low level of happiness. The finding also reveals that the happiness score is positively correlated with the current age, age at first use of mobile phone and negatively correlated with procrastination and addiction score. The regression and path analysis shows that the addiction score has had the most impact on the happiness score than the other predictors on the postgraduate university girl students using social media. Conclusion: Findings indicate the need for providing counselling in order to reduce social media addiction and procrastination so that happiness will be enhanced.

Keywords: University girl students, social media addiction, procrastination, happiness