Today's Edition
A. SREENIVASA REDDY (ABU DHABI)
An academic study found that university students in Abu Dhabi are using the Internet for more than seven hours a day, and mostly for entertainment purposes rather than for their studies.
The study, done by Ayman Alkhady, a Jordan-based academic, was published in Intercontinental Journal of Social Sciences (IJSS).
It took a sample of 600 male and female university students studying in the UAE's capital.
The author of the research paper, who heads Academic Guidance Department at Kuwaiti Embassy in Amman, sought to study the impact of students' use of the Internet - especially social media - on their academic performance. Social media use was found to be students' biggest pastime.
TikTok was the most popular social media app, with nearly 69.7% of surveyed students using it. The second most popular was WhatsApp, accounting for 13.5%. Snapchat accounted for 9.5% of users, Facebook for 4.8%, and X (formerly Twitter) had the smallest following at 2.5%.
The second question that the survey tackled is how much time each student spent on the Internet everyday. The survey came out with a startling revelation -over 84% of students spent more than seven hours a day on the Internet. A total of 10.3% of the students surveyed reported using the Internet between four to seven hours daily, and 4.2% used it for one to three hours. Only 1.5% of the 600 university students surveyed reported spending less than one hour on the Internet.
The research paper also sought to understand the motivation behind students' use of the Internet. On this count too, the study had some shocking results, with a whopping 57% of the sample population using the world wide web for watching movies and listening to music. A total of 31.2% of the respondants reported using the Internet for chatting and communication, while a measly 5.2% said they used the web for studying and deepening their knowledge of course materials.
The conclusion states loud and clear that students' use of the Internet is driven by entertainment, rather than by studies.
The fourth question tackles the relationship between time spent on the Internet and academic performance.
Surprisingly, there is positive relationship between Internet use and academic performance, meaning that students who used the Internet more also tended to perform better academically.
However, it's important to note that correlation does not equal causation, and there could be other factors influencing both Internet use and academic performance.
