The Attitudes of the Young towards Social Media

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the attitudes of young individuals towards social media. The study sample consisted of 391 university students studying at different faculties (172 males and 219 females) and with an age average of 22.47±2.29. The participants were selected using the appropriate sampling method, which is one of the non-random sampling methods. The data collection tools involved a personal information form and the “Social Media Attitude Scale” developed by Otrar and Argın (2015). Descriptive statistics were applied to determine the distribution of personal information (e.g., frequency, arithmetic mean, standard deviation) and the Shapiro Wilks normality test to check whether the data had a normal distribution. Since the data were appropriate for parametric tests, an independent t-test and ANOVA were applied to find the differences in social media use by specific demographic characteristics. According to the study findings, there was a significant difference in social media use by gender and faculty (p < 0.05), but no significant difference was found by age (p > 0.05). It was concluded that the participants' attitudes towards social media varied by only gender and faculty.