MASS COMMUNICATION STUDENTS USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND THEIR INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN UNIBEN

ABSTRACT

Social media is an important tool that allows people to communicate with others. There are many advantages of using the social media, but one of the most serious challenges that students are facing, is that, it is affecting their interpersonal communication relationship. For example, they use social media to share their feelings instead of face to face communication. The objective of the research is to   Investigate the time students spend communicating through social media sourcing of relevant informations, find out the positive impact(s) of social media on Mass communication students; specifically, their levels of interpersonal communication and ascertain the negative impact(s) of social media platform usage on Mass communication students; specifically, their levels of interpersonal communication. In order to achieve this, the survey design was adopted for the study. The study employed students of the department of mass communication, University of Benin. The study adopted the purposive and systematic sampling technique. This technique was used to select the four (4) levels in the department of mass communication in UNIBEN. The research instrument for this study was a 10 item questionnaire presented in six sections A-G. The instrument of this study was administered to two hundred and eighty (290) students of the mass communication department in the University of Benin. The method employed for data collection for this study was the self-administration of questionnaire to respondents and data was analyzed using simple tables, frequency, percentages and mean scores. The baseline for the percentage was 100%.